Presenting queer visual history

In this gender studies project, we develop methods for conducting queer visual history to write queer and trans history. We research how gender and sexual diversity have been expressed by analysing archived photographs and contextual ego-documents of first-wave feminists, female couples, wartime photographers, and bachelors. In our project, we develop and apply interdisciplinary methods to interpret the appearances, homes, dwellings, and environments apparent in such pictures by drawing from affect studies, new materialism, and human geography. Our project theorises the possibilities of queer visual history to study queer lives. We will, among other publications, coauthor a handbook for studying the past by using visual history. The knowledge we produce will add a historical angle to the current understanding of uncharted gender and sexual diversity and present it as a varied social phenomenon that changes over time.