Queering Monuments: Reclaiming Futures

• In Event: Queering the Past

Abstract

My paper focuses on the materials and graffiti scattered on and around the Richmond, VA, Lost Cause monuments during Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020. Queering the monument, the scattered ephemera name and remember racialized and gendered bodies whose nonnormative sexualities simultaneously excluded them from prevailing conceptions of blackness and rendered them even more hypervisible for violent surveillance. As alternative memorials, the ephemeral materials intervene in formal systems of memory and memorializing, refusing assimilation into recognizable standards of history making. They revisit and reclaim the past to envision to usher other futures into the present.

Presenter

• Christine Cynn, Virginia Commonwealth University