19 November 2025

Photo: Studio Other Spaces (SOS)

Queering the City: Urban spaces and queer subjectivities from a historical and cultural studies perspective – the example of Hamburg's St. Pauli district

Didine van der Platenvlotbrug (Hamburg) & Manuel Bolz, M.A. (Göttingen/Hamburg)

The lecture presents a collaboration between cultural anthropological research and work, queer activism, and queer urban and historical education in Hamburg's St. Pauli district. It operates at the intersection of urban and spatial research, queer anthropology, gender history, engaged self-reflective research, and historical anthropology. It focuses on the relationship between urban space and gender from a queer theoretical perspective.

Selected biographies – such as those of dancers Marta Halusa and Margot Liu, bar owner Ingrid Sonja Liermann, and drag artists Liddy Bacroff, Sylvin Rubenstein and Heinrich Bode – provide insights into queer ways of life during the Nazi Regime and the post-war period, as well as into the resistance practices of local actors in Hamburg St. Pauli in the 20th and 21st centuries. The strategies of bar owner Katharina and artists such as Kirsten Nilsson and Angie Stardust also show how dominant gender roles were creatively subverted and non-normative self-images articulated.

Based on cultural-historical sources, these queer worlds are presented in a neighbourhood that is often described as ‘colourful’ – but mostly from a male perspective. Female and non-binary narratives are often missing and form a gap that the lecture aims to fill. Starting from biographical and everyday contexts, a microhistorical perspective translates the ‘big’ narrative of the neighbourhood into ‘small’ stories. One aim of the lecture is to make queer positionalities and marginalised actors visible in public discourse and the culture of remembrance. Through a queer reading of social, political and historical contexts, normative assumptions and their impact on everyday life and local memory politics are deconstructed. Despite existing archives and forms of representation in popular culture, it becomes clear how selective traditions of transmission marginalise queer history.

The article argues for understanding the city as a queer space of knowledge, action and possibility – as a place where normative boundaries, cultural codes, identity constructions and forms of desire can be 'shifted'. 'Queering the city' thus becomes both a method of critique and a strategy for cultural-political intervention, for example to break down dominant historical narratives.

Didine van der Platenvlotbrug is a queer activist, moderator, drag queen and stage performer. She has been active in various political and queer contexts for over 30 years, for example at the Queer Lighthouse St. Pauli. She also gives regular lectures at universities, hosts a regular radio show and a queer-feminist podcast, moderates a philosophical talk show, and conducts queer art tours and performances at the Kunsthalle Hamburg and the Deichtorhallen. She is part of a queer think tank for social issues of the future in southern France. As a diversity manager, she also organises a queer art festival and workshops for queers and allies in companies, schools, other educational institutions and queer spaces. In 2020, she founded the Feminité - Weiblichkeiten-Museum St. Pauli (Feminité - Femininity Museum St. Pauli) together with other activists. In 2024, the book ‘Weiblichkeiten auf St. Pauli’ (Femininity in St. Pauli) was published by Junius-Verlag.

Manuel Bolz is a cultural Anthroplogist. He works, researches and teaches in Hamburg and Göttingen. After studying Anthropological Studies in Culture and History and German language and literature in Hamburg and gaining initial professional experience as a student and research assistant, tutor and lecturer in Hamburg and Kiel, as well as a freelance cultural scientist and research project assistant for universities, cultural institutions, foundations and museums, he joined the Institute for Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology at the University of Göttingen in October 2023. There, he is working on an ethnographic doctoral project on urban security conflicts, the securitisation of urban pleasure and the production of an urban security regime in Hamburg's St. Pauli district after the Second World War. He is active in the Historical-Cultural Studies Workshop (hkw), the Hamburg Society for Empirical Cultural Studies (hgekw) and the Research Association for the Cultural History of Hamburg (FKGHH).

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