Books by Jennifer Evans
Holocaust Memory in the Digital Mediascape, 2023
Holocaust Memory in the Digital Mediascape (Bloomsbury UK, 2023) is the first book of its kind to... more Holocaust Memory in the Digital Mediascape (Bloomsbury UK, 2023) is the first book of its kind to analyze the way social media has molded and shaped how people think, represent, and remember the Holocaust. Centered around the five most popular digital platforms in use today: Flickr, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, it asks how social technology affects the way history is made and circulated online. Social media has become a place where memories of the Holocaust take shape through user-driven content shared in elaborately interconnected communication networks. Alongside curated exhibits, documentaries, and scholarly research, smartphone photos, short videos, and online texts act as windows into popular consciousness. They document how everyday people make sense of the crime of genocide, presenting unique challenges to historians. Does participatory media create a different understanding of genocide than more traditional forms of writing? How does expertise manifest in the digital public sphere? Do YouTube tourist videos and concentration camp selfies undermine the seriousness of the Holocaust and Holocaust Studies by extension? How does networked memory making affect the kinds of stories told? What evidence is drawn upon to make claims about the past and what mechanisms are used to ensure accuracy and counter hate? How have Holocaust museums responded to both the challenges and opportunities that Web 2.0 provides to broaden their mandate and involve more people in the conscious study of the past? This book provides answers to these questions by analyzing the way vernacular memory around the Holocaust and postwar reckoning and reconciliation is mobilized as well as contested in the digital sphere so as to better equip educational programmers, researchers, and students alike to understand how average individuals think about mid century crimes against humanity and their resonance in the postwar period.
GENDER IN GERMANY AND BEYOND Essays in Honor of Jean Quataert, 2023
Jean Quataert redefined the boundaries of at least five historical fields including European soci... more Jean Quataert redefined the boundaries of at least five historical fields including European socialism, women’s history and gender history, and international law and human rights. In this volume dedicated to her pioneering work, established and emerging scholars showcase the signature ways in which Quataert, as one of the discipline’s first women’s historians, has influenced how subsequent generations think about history writing as a form of intellectual activism. Gender in Germany and Beyond presents cutting edge historiographical commentary alongside new work which address subjects such as the history of German colonialism and women’s colonial leagues, human rights advocacy during the Cold War, and the complexities of turn of the century gay and lesbian rights organizing.
The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism, 2023
The Queer Art of History examines postwar and contemporary German history to broadly argue for a ... more The Queer Art of History examines postwar and contemporary German history to broadly argue for a practice of queer history that moves beyond bounded concepts and narratives of identity. Drawing on Black feminism, queer of color critique, and trans studies, Evans points out that although many rights for LGBTQI people have been gained in Germany, those rights have not been enjoyed equally. There remain fundamental struggles around whose bodies, behaviors, and communities belong. Kinship is an ideal analytic category to identify the fraught and productive ways that Germans have confronted race, gender nonconformity, and sexuality in social movements, art, and everyday life. The Queer Art of History shows how kinship illuminates the work of solidarity and intersectional organizing across difference and offers an openness to forms of contemporary and historical queerness that may escape the archive’s confines. Through forms of kinship, queer and trans people test out new possibilities for citizenship, love, and public and family life in postwar Germany in ways that question claims about liberal democracy, the social contract, and the place of identity in rights-based quests for change.
Was ist Homosexualität? Forschungsgeschichte, gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen und Perspektiven, i... more Was ist Homosexualität? Forschungsgeschichte, gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen und Perspektiven, in English What is Homosexuality? Research, Social Development, and Societal Perspectives (Männerschwarm 2014), is designed for a crossover audience. It provides an introduction to debates about the way same-sex sexuality has been perceived by doctors, legislators, academics, and everyday people from Classical Antiquity to the present day. Evans’s PhD student, Jane Freeland, also contributed an essay to the volume entitled “Homosexuality and the Science of History in Anglo-American Perspective.”
Queer Cities, Queer Cultures examines the formation and make-up of urban subcultures and situates... more Queer Cities, Queer Cultures examines the formation and make-up of urban subcultures and situates them against the stories we typically tell about Europe and its watershed moments in the post 1945 period. The book considers the degree to which the iconic events of 1945, 1968 and 1989 influenced the social and sexual climate of the ensuing decades, raising questions about the form and structure of the 1960s sexual revolution, and forcing us to think about how we define sexual liberalization - and where, how and on whose terms it occurs.
An international team of authors explores the role of America in shaping particular forms of subculture; the significance of changes in legal codes; differing modes of queer consumption and displays of community; the difficult fit of queer (as opposed to gay and lesbian) politics in liberal democracies; the importance of mobility and immigration in modulating queer urban life; the challenge of AIDS; and the arrival of the internet.
By exploring the queer histories of cities from Istanbul to Helsinki and Moscow to Madrid, Queer Cities, Queer Cultures makes a significant contribution to our understanding of urban history, European history and the history of gender and sexuality.
As home to 1920s debauchery and excess and Hitler's Final Solution, Berlin's physical and symboli... more As home to 1920s debauchery and excess and Hitler's Final Solution, Berlin's physical and symbolic landscape was an important staging ground for the highs and lows of modernity. Life among the Ruins asks how postwar attempts to rebuild infrastructure and identity necessitated an engagement with past practices set in motion long before 1945. Berliners were forced to adapt swiftly to changing historical circumstances. City spaces could be enabling as well as restrictive, sites of danger and desire, places of crime and adventure. As expats, soldiers, visitors, and citizens navigated the ruined urban landscape in search of what once was, they discovered signs of destruction but also signs of life. Although a symbol of defeat and destruction, the rubble gave refuge to a reemerging gay and lesbian scene, while youth gangs, prostitutes, hoods, and hustlers sought shelter and community there. As a metaphor for a modernity both feared and desired, the book questions what became of this history in the years leading up to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 when Cold War confrontation meant the city continued to occupy a unique place in 20th century European history.
Articles and Book Chapters by Jennifer Evans
This article is part of the collaborative research project Populist Publics. Housed at Carleton U... more This article is part of the collaborative research project Populist Publics. Housed at Carleton University (www.carleton.ca/populistpublics), it applies a data-driven analysis of online hate networks to trace how false framings of the historical past, what we call historical misinformation, circulates across platforms, shaping the politics of the center alongside the fringes. We cull large datasets from social media platforms and run them through a variety of different programs to help visualize how harmful speech and civilizational rhetoric about race, ethnicity, immigration, multiculturalism, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ rights are circulated by far-right groups across borders, noting specifically when and how they are taken up in the mainstream as legitimate discourse. Our interest is in how the distortion of the historical record is used to build alternative collective memories of the past so as to undermine minority rights and cultures in the present. We began with a basic question: To what extent is this actually new? As much as the atomized publics of our current day create ideal conditions for radical ideas to fester and circulate, it was obvious to us that we needed to look for linkages across time, drawing on interdisciplinary methods from the fields of history, media and communication, and data science to identify the tactics, strategies, and repertoires among such groups and individuals. By analyzing German-Canadian relations in particular, what follows is a first attempt to piece together some of these connections, with a focus on far-right hate groups-homegrown and imported-in the settler colonial project that is today's Canada.
Dies- und jenseits des Großen Teichs. Festschrift für James Steakley zum 75. Geburtstag (On This Side and the Other of the Big Pond: Commemorative Volume for James Steakley on his 75th Birthday),, 2020
German History, 2005
Wenn wir einen Biirger erziehen, so erziehen wir damit auch das sexuelle Gefiihl. (When we educat... more Wenn wir einen Biirger erziehen, so erziehen wir damit auch das sexuelle Gefiihl. (When we educate a citizen, we also educate them in matters of sexual desire.)' Anton Makarenko Amid rising summer temperatures and growing expectations, delegates descended upon Berlin in July 1958 for the fifth party congress of the Socialist Unity Party (SED). Setting out objectives for the congress on its opening day, * I would like to thank the institutions and individuals that aided me in the preparation of this article. Research support was funded by both the SSRC Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies and the Social Sciences Historical Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
German Studies Review, 2012
Sexuality and Culture, 2004
German History, 2020
We came to the question of queering the history of the Third Reich from two different
viewpoints.... more We came to the question of queering the history of the Third Reich from two different
viewpoints. Jennifer Evans is a visual historian who has argued that we tend to focus our
histories exclusively on violence and regulation to the extent that we cannot see other
ways in which photographs work. Elissa Mailänder is a historian of everyday life who
focuses on violent acts to draw out their material, social and cultural dimensions. What
connects us is our shared interest in diverse subject positions, performative acts and
the ambiguities of seeing with and through photographs. In this co-authored article,
we use two case studies to illustrate the value of queer visual culture methodologies for
how to think about the visualization of violence, masculinity and desire through two
distinct genres of photography: the police mugshot and amateur soldier snapshots.1 To
queer how we read these images does not mean that we are looking to redefine identity
categories, to define cross-dressing anew. Rather, we seek to call attention to the limitations
of seeing images like the ones under examination here as simple expressions of
fixed and firm gender and sexuality configurations. As sociologists Candace West and
Don Zimmermann have argued, gender is not a set of traits attributed to or appropriated
by a person but a social doing that needs to be constantly re-enacted and rebuilt.
By asking what is at stake in viewing all acts of cross-dressing as part of a gay or trans
identity, we show that, in West and Zimmermann’s words, ‘gender depictions are less a
consequence of our “essential sexual natures” than interactional portrayals of what we
would like to convey about sexual natures, using conventionalized gestures’.2 In questioning
what we think we see photographically, we take up the challenge put forward by
Laura Doan about the supposed transparency of identity categories as lenses through
which to gauge the past.3 We ask, What gets erased or obscured when we claim these
photos as evidence of fixed and firm identities and what role does photography play in
this process?
Seminar: a Journal of Germanic Studies, 2021
This article analyzes the New Fascism Syllabus private Facebook discussion group, which came into... more This article analyzes the New Fascism Syllabus private Facebook discussion group, which came into being in the months following the 2016 US presidential election. Through the use of several scraping, data mining, and visualization programs and Facebook's own platform analytics software, the article posits ways we might analyze Facebook fora as a mediated digital public sphere. It argues that digital spaces like these, however fraught, help users craft arguments and points of contention around how to oppose resurgent authoritarianism. Online discussion creates aff ective communities that help bond participants, who in turn shape the construction of popular memory around the history and legacy of fascism.
Rethinking History, 2018
This article explores the role of the museum audioguide as a relational, sensorially driven mode ... more This article explores the role of the museum audioguide as a relational, sensorially driven mode of making and communicating diverse histories. It argues that the artist Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay’s use of voice, storytelling, gesture, movement, and sound helps create conditions for empathic listening, bridging the past and present and widening the spectrum of possibilities for new and diverse knowledge formations. This use of aesthetic and historical registers, the blending of fact with fiction, stresses multivalence and possibility over a singular narrative truth. The act of listening promotes a shared though subjective experience, one that challenges the exclusionary function of traditional museum displays, which turn on objective, documentary claims, while actually reflecting a hegemonic vision of the past. In this way, Nemerofsky offers a queer historical practice for how we might (re)present the diversity of past pasts.
What does it mean to queer German history? More provocatively, how might queering it move us to a... more What does it mean to queer German history? More provocatively, how might queering it move us to ask new and different questions of our work, regardless of whether we write about matters of intimacy, eros, sexuality or love? This special issue presents five articles that, in unique and different ways, critically reconstruct the lifeworlds, struggles and intimacies of same-sex desiring men, women and gender variant people over the longue durée. At the same time, in the spirit of two decades' worth of scholarship that sees queer as much as a methodological intervention as an epithet, it seeks to go a step further. If the ultimate point of a queered German history is not simply to chronicle the exploits of same-sex identified people over time for an audience already open to the history of sexuality, then this introduction aims to suggest ways in which queering German history might aid us in thinking more critically about how conventions, ideals, norms and, above all, practices gain traction and resonance in our history writing, often as unquestioned truths. As I'll show, a critical approach drawing on the insights of 'queer theory' sheds light on the processes by which hierarchies of meaning and experience generally are made and remade in different spaces and places, including how it is that they sometimes come to be regarded as unchanging and immutable. A queered history questions claims to a singular, linear march of time and universal experience and points out the unconscious ways in which progressive narrative arcs often seep into our analyses. To queer the past is to view it sceptically, to pull apart its constitutive pieces and analyse them from a variety of perspectives, taking nothing for granted. Keenly attuned to how power manifests as a subject of study in its own right as well as something we reproduce despite our best intentions to right past wrongs, a queer methodology emphasizes overlap, contingency, competing forces and complexity. It asks us to linger over our own assumptions-individual as well as societal-to interrogate the role they play in the past that we seek out, discover and recreate in our writing. To queer history, then, is to think about how even our best efforts of historical restitution might inadvertently limit what is in fact discernable in the past despite attempts to make visible alternative ways of being in the world in the present. How might history look if we were to render historical categories strange instead of assuming they apply more or less uniformly across time, to all people? To queer history instead of just writing histories of queerly situated or queer identified people is to draw on a wide array of conceptual tools-often from other disciplines-to lay bare common assumptions about the world in which our subjects lived. When we do this, we begin to write histories that chip away at the progress narrative with its overwhelming focus on the twentieth century as that moment when sexual knowledge and practices evolved out of repression and shame to enlightenment, making space for tolerance and diversity. Instead, by taking up one of Laura Doan's arguments in her 2013 book * I wish to thank the journal editors, who have championed this special issue and given unending support in shepherding it through to publication.
This edited forum explores the extent to which Holocaust history has taken the cultural turn.
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Books by Jennifer Evans
An international team of authors explores the role of America in shaping particular forms of subculture; the significance of changes in legal codes; differing modes of queer consumption and displays of community; the difficult fit of queer (as opposed to gay and lesbian) politics in liberal democracies; the importance of mobility and immigration in modulating queer urban life; the challenge of AIDS; and the arrival of the internet.
By exploring the queer histories of cities from Istanbul to Helsinki and Moscow to Madrid, Queer Cities, Queer Cultures makes a significant contribution to our understanding of urban history, European history and the history of gender and sexuality.
Articles and Book Chapters by Jennifer Evans
viewpoints. Jennifer Evans is a visual historian who has argued that we tend to focus our
histories exclusively on violence and regulation to the extent that we cannot see other
ways in which photographs work. Elissa Mailänder is a historian of everyday life who
focuses on violent acts to draw out their material, social and cultural dimensions. What
connects us is our shared interest in diverse subject positions, performative acts and
the ambiguities of seeing with and through photographs. In this co-authored article,
we use two case studies to illustrate the value of queer visual culture methodologies for
how to think about the visualization of violence, masculinity and desire through two
distinct genres of photography: the police mugshot and amateur soldier snapshots.1 To
queer how we read these images does not mean that we are looking to redefine identity
categories, to define cross-dressing anew. Rather, we seek to call attention to the limitations
of seeing images like the ones under examination here as simple expressions of
fixed and firm gender and sexuality configurations. As sociologists Candace West and
Don Zimmermann have argued, gender is not a set of traits attributed to or appropriated
by a person but a social doing that needs to be constantly re-enacted and rebuilt.
By asking what is at stake in viewing all acts of cross-dressing as part of a gay or trans
identity, we show that, in West and Zimmermann’s words, ‘gender depictions are less a
consequence of our “essential sexual natures” than interactional portrayals of what we
would like to convey about sexual natures, using conventionalized gestures’.2 In questioning
what we think we see photographically, we take up the challenge put forward by
Laura Doan about the supposed transparency of identity categories as lenses through
which to gauge the past.3 We ask, What gets erased or obscured when we claim these
photos as evidence of fixed and firm identities and what role does photography play in
this process?
An international team of authors explores the role of America in shaping particular forms of subculture; the significance of changes in legal codes; differing modes of queer consumption and displays of community; the difficult fit of queer (as opposed to gay and lesbian) politics in liberal democracies; the importance of mobility and immigration in modulating queer urban life; the challenge of AIDS; and the arrival of the internet.
By exploring the queer histories of cities from Istanbul to Helsinki and Moscow to Madrid, Queer Cities, Queer Cultures makes a significant contribution to our understanding of urban history, European history and the history of gender and sexuality.
viewpoints. Jennifer Evans is a visual historian who has argued that we tend to focus our
histories exclusively on violence and regulation to the extent that we cannot see other
ways in which photographs work. Elissa Mailänder is a historian of everyday life who
focuses on violent acts to draw out their material, social and cultural dimensions. What
connects us is our shared interest in diverse subject positions, performative acts and
the ambiguities of seeing with and through photographs. In this co-authored article,
we use two case studies to illustrate the value of queer visual culture methodologies for
how to think about the visualization of violence, masculinity and desire through two
distinct genres of photography: the police mugshot and amateur soldier snapshots.1 To
queer how we read these images does not mean that we are looking to redefine identity
categories, to define cross-dressing anew. Rather, we seek to call attention to the limitations
of seeing images like the ones under examination here as simple expressions of
fixed and firm gender and sexuality configurations. As sociologists Candace West and
Don Zimmermann have argued, gender is not a set of traits attributed to or appropriated
by a person but a social doing that needs to be constantly re-enacted and rebuilt.
By asking what is at stake in viewing all acts of cross-dressing as part of a gay or trans
identity, we show that, in West and Zimmermann’s words, ‘gender depictions are less a
consequence of our “essential sexual natures” than interactional portrayals of what we
would like to convey about sexual natures, using conventionalized gestures’.2 In questioning
what we think we see photographically, we take up the challenge put forward by
Laura Doan about the supposed transparency of identity categories as lenses through
which to gauge the past.3 We ask, What gets erased or obscured when we claim these
photos as evidence of fixed and firm identities and what role does photography play in
this process?