Memory care and queer akinship at the former Uckermark concentration camp for girls and young women

Abstract

This article turns to the queer memorial activism of the Uckermark Initiative in Germany. This network of feminist, lesbian, queer and trans antifascist activists has been organizing for over two decades to memorialize forgotten victims of Nazi terror – girls and young women who were incarcerated for their non-conforming gender, sexual and social behaviour at the Uckermark Youth concentration camp. The Uckermark Initiative’s memorial activism instantiates my thinking about the performative affects and effects of such organizing. I conceptualize the durational counter-memorial activism enacted on the former camp site as memory care work, which I argue produces new social formations that I term queer akinship. Queer akinship is a social formation enabled by relations of adjacency, where subjects develop queer kin relations through the durational work of caring for the remembrance of forgotten victims of state violence.