Listen to Episode #9: A History of the Pink Triangle with Dr Sébastien Tremblay
In this episode of The Neo Historian we are joined by Dr Sébastien Tremblay to talk about a history of the pink triangle.
Sébastien talks us through how a symbol of persecution, created by the Nazis to shame people classified as homosexual during the National Socialist regime and found on the chest of men condemned to death in concentration camps, developed into a symbol of survival and resistance around the world in the late twentieth century. We also hear about groups who were excluded from using the symbol and those who refused to use the pink triangle under any circumstances. Furthermore Sébastien tells us how the 'symbolic' repositioning of the triangle from the Nazi version pointing down to the optimistic Act-Up version point up, may have been no more than a graphic design oversight.
A Badge of Injury: The Pink Triangle as Global Symbol of Injury is a contribution to both the fields of queer and global history. It analyses gay and lesbian transregional cultural communication networks from the 1970s to the 2000s, focusing on the importance of National Socialism, visual culture, and memory in the queer Atlantic. Provincializing Euro-American queer history, it illustrates how a history of concepts which encompasses the visual offers a greater depth of analysis of the transfer of ideas across regions than texts alone would offer. It also underlines how gay and lesbian history needs to be reframed under a queer lens and understood in a global perspective. Following the journey of the Pink Triangle and its many iterations, A Badge of Injury pinpoints the roles of cultural memory and power in the creation of gay and lesbian transregional narratives of pride or the construction of the historical queer subject. Beyond a success story, the book dives into some of the shortcomings of Euro-American queer history and the power of the negative, writing an emancipatory yet critical story of the era.
Dr. Sébastien Tremblay (he/him) is research associate and lecturer in Modern and Contemporary History at the Europa-University Flensburg. He is also co-director of the research school of its interdisciplinary centre for European Studies. Born in Montreal he obtained his doctorate from the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History in Berlin in 2020.
Dr Sébastien Tremblay: Europa Universität Flensburg
Dr Sébastien Tremblay: Bluesky
Other books mentioned in this episode:
Erinnern stören: Der Mauerfall aus migrantischer und jüdischer Perspektive by Lydia Lierke und Massimo Perinelli
Erinnern stören: Der Mauerfall aus migrantischer und jüdischer Perspektive by Lydia Lierke und Massimo Perinelli
Labor 89. Intersektionale Bewegungsgeschichte*n aus West und Ost. Berlin by Peggy Piesche