Another History of the Present: On Palestine Solidarity and Queer Political Theory with Samu/elle

As part of LGBTQ+ History month, DPIR are highlighting academics from the department who are contributing to queer academic discourse. We caught up with Samu/elle to discuss their work and its importance to them within DPIR. 

What does your research, and particularly your MPhil thesis Queers for Palestine: The challenge of anti-colonial solidarity to Western queer politics explore? 

In my thesis, I engage with the moral and political challenge posed to the Western queer community by the solidarity movement for Palestine. I draw especially on queer Palestinian activists and scholars who have over the decades produced a rich and complex counter-discourse about what it means to be queer and do queer politics (“here” and “there”) and whom I read as profound critiques of both predominantly Western queer studies and liberal philosophies of solidarity and justice.  

Celebrating LGBTQIA+ history always confronts us with the question who is canonised as belonging to this history and who is rendered marginal. I would argue that in times of a global trans panic and increasing attempts to revoke LGBTQIA+ rights (also in Western liberal democracies), queer Palestinian scholarship must be reframed as absolutely central to the canon of queer studies because of its invaluable contribution to understanding how the politics of sexuality and gender are imbricated in the legacies and present violences of racism, imperialism and colonialism. 

How does your research build upon LBGTQIA+ social movement and intellectual history? 

To theorize the current polycrisis that affects us all, albeit in very different forms and intensities, it is very important to ask where the concepts we use to try to make sense of our present come from. What specific academic debates and situated political struggles shaped them, and how does this context still adhere to them?  

To give two examples, I recently completed a chapter for the upcoming Routledge International Handbook of Bisexuality, in which I trace how common prejudices and stereotypes about bisexuality—but also academic conceptions of them as well as activist strategies against them—can be traced back in part to the racist and colonial discourses of European sexology and ethnology discourse of the late 19th century. This seems relevant if we want to engage in a bisexual theory and politics that is committed to anti-racism as well as queer liberation.  

Similarly, in my articles on drag organic intellectuals, drag workshops or the wars on drag and trans* people as well as in the volume I co-edited on the contemporary drag scene in Germany (upcoming in summer 2026), I repeatedly try to make conceptual space for specific historical examples. Clearly, some drag practices are more subversive than others. There are, for example, some exciting explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-racist practices to be found in the history of drag. Examining them closely can equip us with a richer vocabulary to analyse and criticise present limitations in thinking about, say, the aesthetics of gender subversion and abolition––and its gradual incorporation into the neoliberal culture industry. 

Why is this topic important for you to research as a member of DPIR at Oxford? 

The DPIR has set itself the goal to contribute to “a world with a wider understanding of political power, process, and its impact. This is what we study, and this is what we teach.” As a member of the department, I take this vision seriously. Yet, my research is informed not only by other academic outputs and the rich intellectual debates with colleagues in the department and beyond, but also by my own engagement in LGBTQIA+ politics, for example, as a newly elected board member of IGLYO (with over 135 member organisations from over 40 countries across Europe, the largest and oldest trans-national organisation advocating for queer and trans youth) or as a regular author for German queer public journals (such as the Berlin magazine SIEGESSÄULE).  

From personal and political experience, I therefore know about the importance of being able to rely on well-researched and critical academic output on issues of social justice for doing progressive politics. I hope that with my own research I can contribute to this and provide a further tiny piece not just for understanding but changing the existing systems of political power. 

To find out more about Samu/elle and their work, you can refer to their DPIR profile page here. For further information on LGBTQ+ History Month at DPIR this year, please see our launch article.