In Print: The Color of Desire
Publication Title
The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1970
Author
Publisher
Cornell University Press
Publication Date
2024
About the Book (from the publisher)
The Color of Desire tells the story of how, in the aftermath of gay liberation, race played a crucial role in shaping the trajectory of queer, German politics. Focusing on the Federal Republic of Germany, Christopher Ewing charts both the entrenchment of racisms within white, queer scenes and the formation of new, antiracist movements that contested overlapping marginalizations.
Far from being discrete political trajectories, racist and antiracist politics were closely connected, as activists worked across groups to develop their visions for queer politics. Ewing describes not only how AIDS workers, gay tourists, white lesbians, queer immigrants, and Black feminists were connected in unexpected ways but also how they developed contradictory concerns that comprised the full landscape of queer politics. Out of these connections, which often exceeded the bounds of the Federal Republic, arose new forms of queer fascism as well as their multiple, antiracist contestations. Both unsettled the appeals to national belonging, or "homonationalism," on which many white queer activists based their claims. Thus, the story of the making of homonationalism is also the story of its unmaking.
The Color of Desire explains how the importance of racism to queer politics cannot—and should not—be understood without also attending to antiracism. Actors worked across different groups, making it difficult to chart separable political trajectories. At the same time, antiracist activists also used the fractures and openings in groups that were heavily invested in the logics of whiteness to formulate new, antiracist organizations and, albeit in constrained ways, shifted queer politics more generally.
About the Author
Christopher Ewing is an assistant professor in the Department of History whose work takes a transnational approach to histories of race, sexuality, and queerness in contemporary Germany. He received his Ph.D. in 2018 from the City University of New York, and prior to coming to Purdue, he was an assistant professor in history at Virginia Commonwealth University.
His second and forthcoming book project, Hate: A Criminal History of Germany’s Violent ‘90s, examines how Germans made sense of right-wing violence after unification in 1990. By following transatlantic exchanges between activists, law enforcement, and politicians in the US and Germany, this project explains why “hate criminality” became such an important, international framework for understanding diverse forms of targeted violence at the end of the twentieth century.
His work has appeared in The Journal of the History of Sexuality, Sexualities, and Sexuality & Culture. He is currently co-editing an interdisciplinary volume titled Reading Queer Media in the German Speaking World: New Approaches to Print Sources, under contract with Palgrave Macmillan.