Queering Holocaust Studies
Professor Spurlin is Professor of English and Vice-Dean/Education in the College of Business, Arts & Social Sciences, Brunel University London. He has written extensively on the politics of gender and sexual dissidence and is widely known for his work in queer studies. His monograph, Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism (2009), uses queer theory to read against the grain of hetero-textual narratives of the Holocaust and as a way for locating sexuality at its intersections with race, gender, and eugenics within the National Socialist imaginary. His book also challenges prevailing assumptions in the received scholarship that lesbians were not as systematically persecuted by the Nazis.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away.