Over the last years my writings have spanned across a variety of fields, including contemporary art and literature, gender and sexuality, queer theory and social activism (see publications).

Currently, I am focusing on my PhD project in art history at the University of Bergen, Norway. The project – with the working title Touching History: The Affective Economies of Queer Archival Activism – engages with a number of recent queer art, performance, and activist practices that in different ways disrupt or disturb ideologies of progression in the Global North, breaking out of “straight time” frames by entering into anachronistic, melancholic, nostalgic, and desirable relations with the past.

Turning “backwards” towards the past when focusing on contemporary queer politics and activism might seem like a curious move. Especially since activism and social movements are usually understood as being oriented unidirectionally towards the future. But in a time where gender- and sexual activism in Scandinavia is portrayed as being a thing of the past; where declarations on how the “progress have gone to far” in relation to queer and feminist politics frequently emerge in the media, it seems urgent to rethink conceptions of progression in relation to activist politics.

Activists are often understood to be “progressive” subjects driven by a hope in a better future. When moving forward in this way history can be a drag. Indeed, history is often figured as something that pulls one back, that distorts or halts activist movements. This antagonistic relationship between history and action can be found in a number of central thinkers on change and revolution, from Karl Marx’s reflection on how “[t]he tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), to Friedrich Nietzsche’s valuing of the “capacity to feel unhistorically” in order to act and be happy in “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (1873). This antagonistic relationship is still present in contemporary discussions. Touching History sets out to track a different relation between activism and history, one that tries to think beside this alignment of activism with ideologies of progression. The project asks: What happens to our notion of politics and activism if we dismantle the notion of progression as its central temporal framework?

Touching History argues that one may find different important responses to this question in queer, feminist, and antiracist practice. The project enters into dialogue with artistic, performance, and activist work which in different ways deliver a queer take on time and history – practices which invite us to think to the side of chronological progression and narrative sequence. This includes works by artists and performers such as Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Sharon Hayes, Elmgreen and Dragset, Gobsquad, Ira Sachs, DUNST, Nanna Debois Buhl; activist initiatives such as Copenhagen Queer Festival, Queer Nation, ACT UP; theorists and writers such as José E. Muñoz, Carolyn Dinshaw, Carla Freccero, Valerie Rohy, Elizabeth Freeman, Sara Ahmed, Rebecca Schneider, J. Jack Halberstam, Tavia Nyong’o, Gavin Butt, Lene Myong Petersen, Eelco Runia, Audre Lorde, Wendy Brown, David L. Eng, Walter Benjamin and many others.

By giving a space to consider the duration of struggles, the stickiness of history, the intimacy between the living and the dead Touching History wants to complicate political chronicles and chronological narratives that move forward by relegating ongoing fights to the dustbin of history. The aesthetic practices touched upon in Touching History presents numerous ways to intervene in the political grammar of history. By reopening unfinished cases that have been consigned to oblivion, Touching History attempts to outline and perform a broad repertoire of archival activism.