Christopher Ewing
Research Description
At the turn of the 1990s, a new framework for addressing biased motivated violence entered the international political landscape. "Hate criminality," a concept developed by queer and anti-racist activists in the United States during the 1980s, swiftly transcended national borders at a moment of political upheaval, becoming enmeshed in a wider post-Cold War transition. Activists, lawmakers, and police across North America and Europe worked across national boundaries to develop solutions to violence, solutions which often located hate as an individualized problem foreign to democratic principles. However, other anti-racist and queer activists of color argued that such a focus erased the structural foundations of European racism and homophobia. These activists similarly developed transnational networks that stretched across the East/West divide to dismantle structural marginalization. The recreation of narratives of people pushed at the margins of society is therefore closely connected post-1989 transitions, two sub-topics that this project will address. By taking a transnational approach to national law and politics, this research project will answer the question of why hate became a useful way of understanding violence at the precise moment of post-Cold War transition.
Bio
Christopher Ewing is an assistant professor of history at Purdue University. His first book, The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1970 (Cornell University Press, 2023), examines how racism and anti-racism drove the trajectories of German queer movements in the aftermath of gay liberation. His second project, Hate: A Criminal History of the Violent '90s takes a transnational approach to the development of hate crime laws, explaining how hate criminality became a useful way of making sense of violence in multiple national contexts during the 1990s. His work has appeared in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Sexualities, and Sexuality and Culture.
