LGBTQ History Month

"This essay asks whether queer oral history is different in light of recent interventions in queer theory, LGBTQ history, and oral history. It explores the intellectual genealogy of queer oral history in the research projects of some of its early practitioners. It also provides a close reading of Alessandro Portelli's classic essay and considers its implications for a queer methodology, drawing from the work of recent scholarship in queer studies as well as our collaborative research in the Twin Cities Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Oral History Project. Finally, it gestures towards some of the unique dimensions of a queer methodology and its rich potential for research in LGBTQ oral history."

"From its initial engagement with questions about the emergence of sexual identity formation, community life, and social movement activism, LGBT/queer history has expanded to consider the ways in which sexual and gender nonconformity are imbricated in broad histories of power, politics, and the state. Rather than a bounded identity category, "queer" operates in some of this work as a powerful critical lens and mode of analysis, one that exposes and unsettles a range of taken-for-granted assumptions, institutions, and arrangements. This essay explores dynamic new work in the field of LGBT/queer history, most of it focused on the modern U.S. to consider historians' efforts to render sexuality a "useful category of historical analysis," illuminating the imbrication of sexuality and power across a broad range of historical narratives and fields."