Against Oblivion

Queer Memory and Audiovisual Heritage in Southeastern and Eastern Europe

Abstract

This editorial introduces the special issue Queer Memories. Emerging from the 2024 goEast symposium, The Other Queers – Cinematic Images from the Periphery of Europe, and the 2025 Autumn Film School Against Oblivion: Queer Film and Memory at the Slovenian Cinematheque, the issue responds to what we call the “double erasure” of regional queer stories and heritage, marginalised both within local cultural memory frameworks and within dominant global queer historiographies. The editorial outlines how neo-conservative straightwashing and longstanding institutional exclusions shape what becomes visible as history, while also challenging West/East binaries that cast queer culture in the regions we focus upon as either lagging or imported. We conceptualise queer memory as an infrastructure of survival and a set of practices through which memories of queer lives and culture are produced and transmitted: through archives and metadata, circulation and access, aesthetic form, and grassroots labour. The editorial then situates the issue’s contributions – from debunking socialist-era censorship narratives to questions of archival ethics, queer memorial cinema, synaesthetic film form, and conversations with queer practitioners and regional filmmakers – within a broader regional momentum of queer initiatives that use memory in activist ways. The issue demonstrates that Southeastern and Eastern European queer audiovisual heritage is not a peripheral afterthought, but a crucial vantage point for rethinking queer historiography, cultural heritage, and queer temporalities today.