With The Queer Art of History, Jennifer V. Evans points out the limitations of identitarian queer histories and uncovers the potential of queer kinship as a methodology. In conversation with foundational scholars exploring the intersections of queer theory and kinship studies since the 1990s and 2000s—from Kath Weston and Gayle Rubin to Roderick Ferguson, Fatima El-Tayeb and Jin Haritaworn—Evans attends to complexity, embracing transgression and centering the erotic alongside the political. Ultimately, Evans aims to queer historiography, offering a vision of history as a queer art.

“As an analytic, queer kinship is conceptually nimble,” Evans asserts in the introduction (5). This nimbleness is due in part to the author’s deployment of queerness and kinship as strategically broad terms—so broad indeed that some readers may wonder whether they can mean anything and everything. But Evans mobilizes these concepts as critical theoretical interventions. Conceived “not as an identity category but as a set of relations produced by and through shifting and unequal dynamics of power” (3), queerness is de-essentialized and reframed as a conceptual problem that raises questions about representation, signification, materiality and emotion. Evans argues for a heterogeneous account of queer subjectivity that thinks across difference and addresses tensions as well as troubling desires, demonstrating that such capacious thinking can lay the foundation for an expansive queer history. To this end, kinship is denaturalized—moving away from filial, legal and medical frameworks—through an approach informed by Black feminist, queer and trans of color, and postcolonial critiques. A relational understanding of kinship “serves as a better conceptual model than identity” because—in spotlighting intimacies, affinities and coalitions—it “directs our attention to the fraught and sometimes contingent alliances and associations born of struggle” (214–15). A methodology of queer kinship accordingly serves “to pull apart normative notions of family and nation, placing emphasis on affinities across race and class as well as on the attachments and the affective ties that bind individuals to one another across time” (5). Notably, such ties also include the intellectual and emotional bonds historians may feel with their subjects of study from past eras.

Queer kinship engages a critique of liberal, rights-based frameworks organized around ideals of visibility, emancipation and institutionalization. Evans thus writes against the conventional periodization of queer history as a trajectory of assimilation and integration, of unilateral progression from abjection to acceptance. A drawback of such frameworks is that they normativize queer subjectivity around hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, class, and citizenship. Restorative histories that center whiteness and gay masculinity at the expense of working-class, sexually dissident and non-European orientations flatten the complexity of queer worldmaking by erasing and doing violence to racialized as well as gender nonconforming and trans subjects. Evans offers a corrective by focusing on boundary-breaking desires and cross-group alliances, training a critical eye to affiliations and pleasures that are messy, contradictory or downright problematic.

In six chapters, the book examines the entangled queer and trans histories of post-fascist Germany, exploring the possibilities and tensions they produce. Exemplary of this approach is the close reading in chapter 5 of the controversy surrounding the Memorial for the Homosexuals Persecuted under Nazism (Denkmal für die im Nationalsozialismus ermordeten Homosexuellen, also called the “Homo-Monument”), which opened in 2008 in the Berlin Tiergarten. Together with chapter 4 on queer activism in the postwar decades, this section of Evans’s book traces kinships around the resonance of the Nazi past in queer community building, the politicization of identity, memory work and commemoration projects from postwar to contemporary Germany. Titled “The Boundaries of Toleration,” chapter 5 asks: Who is a victim—specifically, a queer victim of the Holocaust—and how does this intersect with other persecutions? In unraveling the strands of the debate over the design and implementation of the Homo-Monument, Evans exposes the identitarian impulses in queer memorialization: the tendency to mainstream memory around narrow conceptions of queer subjectivity, alongside the struggle to capture the intersectionality of oppression. Reactions to the planned monument contested its suggestion of a genealogy from gay white male victimhood in the Nazi era to citizenship and equality in the transnational present, a politics of representation that suppresses the persecution of lesbians, trans people and queers of color, and obscures the workings of sexism and racism in rhetorics of diversity and politics of tolerance. Through this exploration of how artists and activists in and beyond Germany envision kinship with victims of historical violence and make claims to collective memory, Evans demonstrates the value of finding “ways of keeping it messy” while making sense of such debates as “an exercise in kinship and place making” (183).

In keeping with the eponymous “queer art of history,” several chapters bring together the aesthetic and the historical by studying images and installations as primary historical texts. In chapters 2, 3, and 6, Evans invites readers to consider the significance of queer photography and art in forging kinship not only through persecution and victimhood, but also through desire and pleasure, eroticism and excess, fantasy and joy. Chapters 2 and 3 offer a historiography of queer photography and trans visibility, focusing on the erotic portraiture of shutterbug Herbert Tobias (b. 1924, d. 1982) and archival depictions of gender nonconforming bodies and people, respectively. Here Evans emphasizes affect in uncovering embodied histories of longing and desire, tracing iconographic genealogies from the Weimar era to the twenty-first century. Titled “The Optics of Desire,” chapter 2 makes a compelling case for treating photography as historical evidence, recognizing its agentic quality: in its hermeneutic ambivalence, erotic portraiture creates kinship between photographic subjects and audiences, engaging mutual desire. Importantly, Evans argues for contending with so-called bad kinships—disturbing attachments that are illicit or nonconsensual: from cruising, hustling, and intergenerational sex to coercion, abuse and assault—because they challenge normativizing discourses and reveal fundamental features of pre-decriminalization queer desires. In chapter 6 on the installations of Benny Nemer (b. 1973), Evans builds on this approach by exploring Nemer’s deployment of cruising as an artistic method, a simultaneously orienting and disorienting practice that enables the tracing of queer kinships into the past as well as the future. Nemer’s audio tours through libraries and archives invite audiences to explore the book collections of queer ancestors, enabling what Evans understands as “touching across time” and “being-together-in-difference” (185–86). This section reflects on scholars’ own relations to the queer pasts they research and to one another, highlighting the ties that bind in networks that emerge through shared practices of reading or viewing, handling, collecting, and citing the same works.

Evans’s intersectional politics of citation exemplify the very kinds of queer kinship that this book studies. The author examines a wide range of documents, analyzing police files, advertisements and museum collections alongside personal photographs, poetry, and social media entries to produce a differentiated, multivocal queer history that attends to alternative temporalities and nonnormative ways of being. The Queer Art of History cites diverse research too, amplifying trans theory, queer of color critique, and the work of Black and Indigenous scholars. This is history worth reading—and sharing with others.