Queer print culture and German studies

Abstract

Queer people have written and read novels and scientific treatises, circulated pamphlets, found each other in classified advertisements, made albums and zines with their friends and lovers, handed out political flyers and buttons, pasted posters on walls, and created private and public archives for these often ephemeral materials. It is through print culture that queer people realized they were part of something larger than themselves. Indeed, print culture has been pivotal for creating a new vocabulary for queer sexuality and desire and has been crucial for raising key questions about identity, kinship, and citizenship. Within the German context, ephemeral handcrafted and popular printed publications have circulated throughout the twentieth century and until today, including Die Freundschaft, Die Freundin, Der Kreis, du&ich, L-Mag, and Siegessäule. These publications and many others are a testament to the diversity of voices, experiences, and positions within queer culture.

Our contribution to this forum builds upon our collaborative work on print and visual culture. We just finished editing Queer Print Cultures: Resistance, Subversion, and Community (University of Toronto Press). In this forthcoming volume, we wanted to expand traditional histories of printed objects, material and visual culture, publishing, and reading to show how queer people have told others about their desires, built coalitions and community, fought against oppression, and imagined different ways of being in the world since the late eighteenth century. Queerness can be found everywhere, but the volume is by no means comprehensive. It provides a sample of different sources, topics, and methodologies we can use to study and teach about queer material and print culture. It was very important for us that we include the voices of professors, librarians, archivists, and activists writing about print culture and queer communities, and that we acknowledge that some printed materials are collected and archived by institutions while others are not. Finally, we wanted to highlight how necessary this work is for teaching. The study of queer print culture offers students the opportunity to go into special collections and the archive, to find themselves reflected in historical materials, and to gather and share these histories with other queer community members.

Queer print culture thus expands the horizon of what we can achieve in queer German studies. Teaching and researching queer print culture forces all of us to grapple with diverse identities, histories, experiences, and politics. If we do not include queer voices and study queer texts we run the risk of misrepresenting how printed materials and cultural objects have been created, shared, and appreciated. When we turn to these otherwise understudied materials it helps us fill in gaps and silences that have been excluded from the historical record, such as the voices of queer and trans People of Color. Queer print studies, moreover, moves us past a history of sexuality that treats material texts solely as archival sources of information for our research and not as significant objects in their own right. We are challenged to pay attention to form, format, and artistic process, as well as to the ways bodies and senses relate to handcrafted objects that illuminate queer lives. Ultimately, queer artists rely on print history and aesthetics in order to come to terms with the queer past and critique the present. We can—and should—integrate their work into our research and teaching.

Two cases in point can be found in the recent work of Jean-Ulrick Désert (b. 1960) and Philipp Gufler (b. 1989). Désert is a Haitian-American, Berlin-based conceptual and visual artist who explores how German traditions are predicated on whiteness and heterosexual norms. He creates ephemeral printed objects such as postcards, billboards, beer coasters, and broadsides to probe hegemonic constructions of Germanness, including race and ethnicity, social habitus, religion, and the legacies of colonialism. On view at his 2023 retrospective at SAVVY Contemporary was his Codex Testimoniorum Amoris / The Book of the Witnesses of Love (2005), a series of eight digital prints on vellum interrogating sex work, violence, migration, and Catholic morality (Figure 1). The formats and formal language of manuscript and print culture—codex, broadsheet, engraving, typography, glossed commentaries, photography, sensationalist newspaper reporting, censorship—help express truths about the ways in which queer subjects have felt desire and faced condemnation in the past and into the present. Désert's juxtaposition of illustration processes, page layout, and confessional narratives creates a complex archive of desire that many in German society and the Catholic Church would prefer to keep hidden.

Philipp Gufler, a German visual artist based in the Netherlands, likewise turns to print to give expression to queer politics and emotion. Gufler's artist books, film, and textiles rework historical elements of queer print culture, such as gay and lesbian magazines, and the artist also critiques sensationalist and homophobic reporting on the HIV/AIDS crisis in the tabloid newspaper Bild. Gufler's Quilt #01 – #30 (2016–) consists of thirty silkscreen printed fabrics that recover political and material culture that has been excluded from traditional histories (Figure 2). The project keeps growing, but Quilt #15 Die Freundin – das ideale Freundschaftsblatt (2016) is particularly striking (Figure 3). While you might imagine that a quilt consists of fabric stitched together forming a pattern, Gufler focuses on layering on translucent fabric prints that reproduce images from historical sources, such as Die Freundin, a lesbian magazine from the Weimar Republic. This art is memory work. Gufler selected fabric in lavender, a color associated with the LGBTQ+ rights movement; its texture is reminiscent of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's Untitled (Water), an installation involving strands of beads suggesting thresholds into a queered space. The porosity of these prints makes them mysterious and enticing. Gufler's art is an invitation to desire and to touch and be touched by the past. While they are not actually quilts in a conventional sense, these artworks metaphorically stitch together pieces of queer and print history. They remind us of flags and banners, common elements of queer political culture, such as the AIDS Memorial Quilt and the rainbow flag. Gufler's work is neither about pride nor shame. It is more than an intimate encounter with the queer past—it is a celebration and politicization of these moments.

The fact that this forum essay is appearing in one of the leading journals in German studies is certainly a sign of the increased institutional status of queer studies. The examples we have given above point out how expansive and rich the queer archive is and that it extends beyond literature and film. Don't get us wrong, literature still matters a great deal. We advocate a queer approach to textuality because it reflects the subversion, the resistance, the ambiguities, and the work against normative approaches and temporalities that are present in literature and, more broadly, in print culture. Embracing the queer potentialities of print means that we call into question hegemonies, norms, and authenticity. The work by Désert, Gufler, and other queer artists and makers does exactly that. Queerness in print culture means historicizing our attachments to texts, and for this we might have to look outside traditional archives and institutional settings.