Queer Politics of Memory: Undisciplined Sexualities as Glimpses and Fragments in Finnish and Estonian Pasts

This study analyses the construction of queer and undisciplined sexualities in Finnish and Estonian personal and cultural memories from the 1990s to the present. The study makes a theoretical contribution to the understanding of queer as historical and localised concept by focusing on geographical areas regarded as the semiperiphery, that is, Finland and Estonia, and combining the discussion on queer historical research with the elaborations on cultural memory. The methodological contribution of the study address the Finnish and Estonian research traditions that have combined oral history methodologies with the study of memories in written form and links these with discussions on sources in queer historical research. In the spirit of Joan Scott and Laura Doan, the study adopts the concept queer as a category of historical analysis and enquires how memories can be analysed by using queer as a methodological tool. Furthermore, the study searches for queerness where ostensibly it does not exist, in the margins of queer. By adopting Michel Foucault’s concept of genealogy, the study addresses the connection between the past and present in both historical research and cultural memory studies and discusses how the intertwined cultural understandings of the past and individual accounts of one’s own sexuality produce the current understandings of sexuality. The concepts of glimpse and fragment are developed in the study to analyse how the queer and undisciplined sexualities are constructed in the present understandings of the pasts. Glimpse refers to memories of desires and identifications or cultural references of queerness that the narrators have used to understand their own desires and, on the other hand, to the recollections of others in the narrations by seemingly non-queer narrators. Fragment refers to all types of documents and material that have been preserved of the past. The fragments can even be fabricated as queer pasts are imagined in the arts. The study develops a three-layered understanding of time in memories and analyses Time Remembered, Time of Remembering and Time of Researching in these glimpses and fragments of queer pasts. The dissertation consists of three published research articles, two yet unpublished article manuscripts and a comprehensive introductory and summarising section. The individual research articles in the study focus on archives, life stories, collections of them and public discussion on queer past in the arts and media. As a collection, these five articles offer a versatile perspective on how memories are produced and utilised both by those who identify as queer and those who use “others” to construct their own suitable heterosexuality. Moreover, the articles analyse how present understandings of queer are projected onto the past. This study demonstrates how the personal and cultural memories are intertwined and produce one another in the queer politics of memory. On the one hand, some glimpses and fragments of queer pasts can be understood in terms of the available queer labels, identifications and identifiable practices. On the other, only through these glimpses and fragments of personal queer memories it is possible to understand the type of queer possibilities there are and have been. Thus, the focus on glimpses and fragments in addition to the proud movements and individuals helps to broaden and historicise the concept of queer. In the conclusion, this study reaches beyond queer pasts to address queer in the present as a politics of memory as well as the possibilities offered by perceiving the past as glimpse-like and fragmented in historical research in general.