Event overview
Sébastien Tremblay, Research Fellow at the Centre for Queer History at Goldsmiths, will speak on his research into the Pink Triangle.
UPDATE: In support of UCU industrial action in the pensions, pay and working conditions disputes, this event will now held in the Liberation Room, Students' Union Building at Goldsmiths on Dixon Road across from the Richard Hoggart Building. We thank the Goldsmiths Students' Union for their hospitality and in hosting this 'teach out' event.
Pink Triangle Bridges: The construction of transatlantic homosexual identities and homosexual collective memories.
Since its recuperation by the German Schwulenbewegung in the mid-1970s, different groups in the Northern Transatlantic World have used the Pink Triangle in different manners. Nevertheless, and quite surprisingly, the historiography of Gay Liberation (and LGBTQIA2+ historiography in general) has always seemed to only include its history as a sideline of their narratives. It is usually taken as a given that the symbol was used by activists, but historians seem to have ignored until today the alterations in the discourses surrounding its connection to identity, semantics and collective memory.
In this talk, Sébastien Tremblay will trace the key moments of the symbol’s transregional and transatlantic journey. Offering a different twist on the usual diffusionist tropes of North American homosexual liberation, he will demonstrate how an analysis of the multilayered history of the Pink Triangle can prove the importance of global history for the understanding of queer history, queer temporalities, and the creation of a cultural LGBTQIA2+ memory. In so doing, Tremblay will finally map the connections between a cross-referential memory of the Holocaust, homonationalism, and postmemory based on victimhood narratives.
Sébastien Tremblay is Doctoral Fellow in Global History at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute (Freie Universität Berlin). He has an M.A. in Global History from the Freie- and Humboldt Universität in Berlin and a B.A. in History and German Studies from the Université de Montréal in Canada. His work has explored the convergence of US-militarized masculinities and homosexualities in the early German Federal Republic, and his present dissertation project offers a queer perspective on the transatlantic and transregional constructivist aspects of the Pink Triangle as a marker of collective identity and collective memory in LGBTQIA2+ activist circles.
Tremblay has held positions at the John. F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies (Berlin), and worked as a historical consultant for the Berlinale's 31st TEDDY Awards. He has published on homophile emotional transatlantic networks and on transatlantic homosexual cultural trauma. His research on transatlantic history earned him the TSA Halle Foundation prize at the TSA annual meeting in 2017 in Cork, Ireland. His research has received funding from the Ernst-Reuter-Gesellschaft, the DAAD, and the IREF in Montreal.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 26 Nov 2019 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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