26/6/2025 – Seminario di Heike Bauer (Birkbeck, University of London, “Pets Portraits and Sapphic Modernism: Queer Kinship beyond the Human”

Da Silvia Antosa

In the next online seminar organised by the Queer Kinship Network, Prof. Heike Bauer explores a number of key issues starting from the following question: How do human-animal relations expand and problematize the limits and possibilities of kinship? Queer scholarship has substantially expanded traditional ideas about kinship. Yet it tends to focus on the lives of humans despite the fact that many of the people who transgress the gender and sexual norms and expectations of their time share their life with non-human companions. This seminar gives centre stage to the pets and strays that populate LGBTQ+ culture in the period from around 1900 to the 1940s, a transformative moment in both queer and animal history. It examines portraits of non-human animals ranging from private snapshots of the Old English Sheepdogs of composer Ethel Smyth to the carefully staged portraits of the cats of Surrealist artist Claude Cahun to consider the complexities of interspecies relations and their place in modern queer history.
You can attend the seminar at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/@QueerKinshipNetwork

Biographical note
Heike Bauer is Professor of Modern Literature and Cultural History at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely on queer history including “The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture” (2017) and the co-edited special issue of Radical History Review, ‘Visual Archives of Sex’ (2022). She is now working on the intersections between animal and LGBTQ+ histories. ‘In the Canine Archives of Sex: Radclyffe Hall, Una Troubridge and their Dogs’, is out with Gender & History (2022).

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