ABSTRACT:

Queer and other theories of Affect have focused attention on the nature and impacts of grief and loss for queer subjectivities and politics, finding them foundational to both individual and collective affiliations and agencies, and dispossessions and disassociations. These explorations have often remained within the limited spatialities and temporalities of an unmarked Western cultural studies. But what happens when queer loss and grief emerge in the fraught dis/identificatory fields of geotemporal sexual politics? What else might we see if we track such material/emotional transformations across the historical arc of event and meaning “elsewhere”? In this talk I explore two trails tracking the shifting trajectory of the emotional politics of queer (non)belonging and (non)futurity in postsocialist Hungary, from dreams of imminent personal and political “normality” in the early 1990s, through growing disillusionment and shame at national and queer “backwardness” in the early 2000s, to the grief, anger, despair at the Orbán regime’s current, brutal heteronational politics. Drawing not on Affect Theory but on anthropological approaches to emotions and their politics, on postcolonial work on belonging’s geotemporality, and queer thinking on the politics of disidentification, I argue for an expansion of the boundaries of spatiality and temporality, and thus the epistemological and political potentials, of current understandings of queer grief.

BIO:

Hadley Z. Renkin received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan; he teaches at the Gender Studies department at Central European University, once in Budapest, Hungary, now in Vienna, Austria. His research focuses on Hungarian sexual politics, Hungary’s LGBTQ movement, and the complexities of the relationships between sexuality and transnational and national belongings in the postsocialist context. He is also interested in the historical intersections of sexuality and geotemporality in the changing orientational politics of Europe’s East. He has written on Hungarian sexual politics, postsocialist homophobias, Eastern European histories of sexual science, and the (dis)connections between anthropological and queer theories.