Queering the Timeline: Imagining Queer Futures from Weimar Germany to 21st Century Switzerland

Abstract

The queer communities in 1920s Weimar Germany and in the 2020s in countries such as the United States, Germany, and Switzerland share similar conditions for imagining queer futures existing outside the realm of heteronormativity. Both periods show signs of a fluctuating relationship between, on the one hand, perceived progress, increased visibility, and acceptance of the queer community, and, on the other, political and social backlash adhering to heteronormative constraints and attempting to foreclose the queer futures lying ahead. In this thesis, I examine how queer communities a century apart imagine queer futures. Through close readings of two illustrated magazines aimed at the German-speaking queer community, Die Freundschaft (1919-33) and Die Freundin (1924-33), and the 2022 novel Blutbuch by Swiss author Kim de l’Horizon, I reveal how and which queer futures are proposed by texts that lend a voice to queer sexual and gender identities. In addition to the thematization of queer sexual and gender identities, a common characteristic in all three texts is the use of assemblage to express queer futurities. The depictions of queer futures within these texts reject notions of heteronormative temporality, while challengingreaders to imagine a queer utopia that flouts restrictive, exclusionary, and harmful norms and policies upholding heteronormativity in society. I show how queer futures proposed in both magazines and in the novel utilize desire, political visions, and the reorganization of temporalities, spaces, and forms to encompass logics that transcend the principles structuring the heteronormative timeline. Thus, the visions for queer futures proposed in these texts, published a century apart, reveal the importance of aesthetic and literary depictions of temporalities that challenge readers to imagine a queer utopia, one in which marginalized groups such as the queer community no longer face the risk of futures or existences being extinguished.