Destabilising identities and normative narratives : the methodological challenges of navigating oral history interviews with LGBTQ+ children of Holocaust survivors

Jacob Evoy

This chapter explores methodological challenges of navigating oral history interviews with LGBTQ+ children of Holocaust survivors. The chapter examines how queer oral historians can destabilise identities within the oral history interview through the questions posed to participants. Furthermore, this chapter explores how queer oral history participants at times expect historians to perform what Eve K. Sedgwick has termed "paranoid readings" of the queer past. In other words, this chapter demonstrates how dominant cultural narratives of queer lives influence and structure queer oral histories to be focused on trauma and homophobia. Finally, this chapter unpacks what is referred to as "Holocaust performativity" and how, through the interview editing process, the discursive markers or limits of normative Holocaust narratives can become known and challenged.