Dr Mori Reithmayr
Teaching Fellow in Gender and Queer History
I'm a queer intellectual historian and political theorist with a focus on the twentieth-century United States. My research recovers the history of US queer political thought as a means of probing wider theoretical questions concerning the meaning of “community,” the historical connections of Black and gay theorizing, and the world-making power of ideas.
Research Interests
- 20th Century US History
- Queer History
- Intellectual History
My book project Ideas for Power: The Invention of Gay Community, 1953-1969 presents the first detailed study of the early history of ideas of ‘gay community’ in North America. Contrary to widely held beliefs, the notion did not emerge naturally or inevitably from an expanding mid-century gay culture. ‘Gay community’ had to be invented – theorized, defended, disseminated, and actively summoned into being. Ideas for Power uses a diverse archive of drag performances, photographs, oral histories, legal documents, gay bar rags, newsletters, and other sources to reconstruct this process. It follows it across three distinct phases: origins; coinage and early pluralism; consolidation and continental dissemination. At each step, the project recovers the debates the so-called ‘homophile’ activists of the 1950s and 1960s – lesbians, gay men, street youth, and their allies – held over the nature, membership, and scope of ‘community,’ sets them within the context of their wider political projects, and shows how homophile notions of community were always ‘ideas for power’: concepts purposefully carved and wielded to achieve collective power.
Ideas for Power builds on my doctoral thesis ‘Community Before Liberation: Theorizing Gay Resistance in San Francisco’ (defended in April 2023 at New College, Oxford, no corrections), which received Honorable Mentions for dissertation prizes from the Organization of American Historians and the American Political Science Association.
