About Me | Christopher Boal Ewing | Assistant Professor | Virginia Commonwealth University
As a historian of Modern Europe, I research the intersections of race, sex, and social movements in postwar Germany. Although my work centers on the Federal Republic, I take a strongly transnational approach, examining the impacts of transatlantic interactions, postcolonial movements, and labor migration on German politics since 1945. My work historicizes the current political moment in both Germany and many other EU countries, in which acceptance of LGBTQI rights has gone hand in hand with an explicit rejection of Islam as "un-European." In so doing, I chart the contradictory developments of racial and sexual politics in German since the collapse of Nazism.
My current manuscript project, The Color of Desire: Untangling Race and Sex in German Queer Politics since 1970, examines the multiple and often contradictory ways in which race, racism, and anti-racism entered queer political movements after 1970. Far from being a peripheral theme, the politics of race were crucial to queer movements in the Federal Republic in the aftermath of gay liberation. Just as many white gay and lesbian Germans both excluded and instrumentalized people of color to make often contradictory political claims, anti-racist activists pushed back against overlapping forms of marginalization, which held lasting ramifications for queer politics more broadly. Only in attending to racism and antiracism together can we explain both troubling undercurrents of contemporary queer politics and the radical possibilities that it continues to offer. My manuscript is under contract with Cornell University Press, with an expected publication date of fall 2023.
I am currently working on two new projects. The first asks how and why the language of hate crimes was imported into the Federal Republic of Germany from the United States to make sense of diverse forms of violence against minoritized groups in the early 1990s. Far from being an apolitical category, hate criminality offered predominantly white, queer activists a tool to collaborate with police and state actors, institutionalizing a rights-oriented approach. At the same time, however, activists, police, and legislators increasingly associated hate crimes with both right-wing nationalism and racial alterity, crystalizing a vision of inclusive German democracy that simultaneously excluded racial “others“ at precisely the moment of German unification.
The second asks how transnational, gay travel networks developed during the 1970s and 1980s. This project seeks to flip the colonial gaze by taking the view from the Global South, investigating the men who disseminated information about their local contexts from countries like Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines, making possible western European and North American gay travel to these spaces. Rather than the passive recipients of tourism from the Global North, many of these men enthusiastically participated in new circuits of travel, while also rearticulating racialized fantasies in ways that at once disrupted and reinforced the Orientalist logics on which they depended. Class stratification delimited access to travel, while global economic disparities structured transnational networks in ways that made it difficult to dislodge entrenched, if shifting, forms of racialization that motivated tourism. Accounting for both strucutural forces and individual experiences, this project situates men of color in the Global South as active agents in the story of Euro-American gay liberation.