November 1, 2024

For historiography we finished off the last lecture which was only around one slide that we didn’t get to. He asked us why there were no Annales historiography of the French Revolution: students said that they were o interested in politics and were more about trade and economics, anything similar. You cannot avoid politics when talking about the French Revolution. Sure you can focus on the lives of the people but they were steeped in politics, so it is unavoidable. He then asked us why interpretations of the French Revolution constantly changed (and continues to): historians are historical agents, their personal experiences and politics will effect their analysis; societal changes also contribute to this phenomenon. A wide array of sources also lend to multiple interpretations alongside new research methods, careerism (historians want to make a splash and also continue to evolve over the course of their career), and national schools of likeminded collaborators.

The rest of the class was about the paper. I will most likely be making a post about this for any resources, I think I found a few but I am actually having hard time. So the paper itself is supposed to be 2000 words comparing two books about the same topic but with different analysis types. The books must be monographs, so single authored and peer reviewed, so not a collection of essays. He told us to choose a large topic so we had a lot to work with. He then shared with us a clip from Good Will Hunting, the bar scene where Will started to argue with this guy who was just repeating shit he read in a book rather than absorbing the information and thinking for himself. He used this as an example of us comparing and contrasting different interpretations of an event/period of time. He also encouraged us to go to the library but when I did I could not find much for my project and I have little faith that my western institution would have anything I need. For my paper I am choosing a queer and a Marxist interpretation of an event, I have yet to choose one. I am sort of caught between the GDR and USSR, as they are both old and have a lot of material. Finding a Marxist analysis of the two will be easy but finding a queer history is proving to be difficult.

  • starkillerfish (she)
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    21 days ago

    for queer and marxist enterpretation of an event, and speaking of GDR maybe the fall of the berlin wall? i’m just reminded of this article https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/gay-liberation-behind-iron-curtain/ that talks about how lgbt rights were rolled back because of the reunification. the only problem with focusing on GDR and USSR for sources is that it would be better to know german or russian in order to read primary sources on the topic.

    • SpaceDogsOPM
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      19 days ago

      So thankfully it doesn’t have to be en event at all, just a period of time in a specific area. I used Gay New York as an example for my professor since it was about gay male life in New York from the 1800s to around the 1960s-70s. He said I could do the same for my topic, so in my case I want to look at queer life or whatever in the GDR or USSR. What is also good is that I don’t need to look at primary sources, that will be a future SpaceDogs problem when I write my dissertation, this paper is comparing two books, so someone else would have read those sources and made a book out of them, then I read that book and write my paper about it. I hope I am making sense. When looking for books about gay life in the GDR I found this book: Love in the Time of Communism: Intimacy and Sexuality in the GDR by Josie McLellan. I believe this book and ones like it would work for my project. I still haven’t settled on GDR or USSR but, yeah, thats what I have to do. I appreciate the article, it will be helpful for me in general.

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik
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    20 days ago

    I have not read much of it, but chapter 8 in Queer(ing) Russian Art looks mildly interesting. Some of the other chapters look slightly interesting, too, but I am basing that on first impressions. From what little that I read of it, The Sexual Revolution in Russia: From the Age of the Czars to Today looks (relatively) tolerable, and Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia is maybe somewhat passable, too, but this is all going off of first impressions, and ‘somewhat passable’ does not mean ‘good’.

    As somebody who regularly studies history, I sympathize with your frustration. In most English works covering the people’s republics, LGBT+ humans and other minorities (e.g. Jews) are oversimplified as passive objects; things simply happen to them. They become sponges whose only true purpose in life is to soak up oppression, and they have no more agency than a generic fairytale’s ‘damsel in distress’ does. I’ve been around the block a few times and I know that that is selective reporting, because even works on Fascism still show gay folk as having more agency than (English) works on the people’s republics do. So anticommunist historiasters have no excuse. (Well, they do have an excuse, but not one that they want to admit in public.)

    • SpaceDogsOPM
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      19 days ago

      Those are really interesting, but like you I am apprehensive. When I looked up “books about gay life in the USSR” or something like that, the only books that came up are from Alexander Rustam. He has three on the topic: Red Closet: the Hidden History of Gay Oppression in the USSR, Regulating Homosexuality in Soviet Russia, 1956-91: A Different History, and Gay Lives and ‘Aversion Therapy’ in Brezhnev’s Russia, 1964-1982*. Another book I found just now is by Daniel Schluter called Gay Life in the Former USSR: Fraternity Without Community.

      Your analysis resonated with me completely, about how minorities are treated as groups that stuff happens to rather than autonomous beings with unique experiences wherever they are. As a queer communist I really focus on this stuff because the history is treated so poorly and it is frustrating to me. I really appreciate your posts too, you cover pretty much everything that has ever crossed my mind and its really helpful.