Queer Histories, Silenced Lives: Memory, Inequality, and the Politics of the Past

Across the world, debates about collective futures are increasingly shaped by political polarization, growing inequalities, and contested interpretations of the past. Queer histories are central to these struggles. The lives, relationships, communities, and political practices of LGBTQIA+ people have often been marginalized, pathologized, criminalized, erased from archives, or rendered unintelligible within dominant historical narratives. At the same time, queer actors, communities, activists, artists, and scholars have continuously challenged these silences through memory work, archival practices, storytelling, activism, kinship, and everyday forms of historical recovery.
Bringing historical sociology and queer sociology into dialogue, this session examines how queer experiences are silenced, remembered, narrated, and contested across time. We invite empirically grounded contributions that investigate the historical production of queer invisibility and the contemporary consequences of such silences. How have queer lives been excluded from public memory, national histories, family narratives, institutional archives, or sociological accounts? How do queer communities reconstruct, transmit, and politicize histories that have been fragmented, hidden, or denied? And how do these processes shape present-day inequalities, identities, solidarities, and struggles for recognition and justice?
We are especially interested in contributions that concretely engage with queer histories and the methodological, theoretical, and political challenges involved in researching them.