Into the Enclosure: Collective Memory and Queer History in the Icelandic Documentary “People like That”

ABSTRACT

This article criticizes an acclaimed Icelandic documentary film series from 2019, People Like That (“Svona fólk”), which has become the quasi-canonical history of the country’s gay and lesbian rights struggle. The series tells the story of the forward march of normalizing progress and change from below, breaking through with the achievement of registered partnership in 1996. This article views the series as an attempt to create a collective memory corresponding to Iceland’s new self-image as a queer utopia. While avoiding historicist criticism, the article presents new stories and memories from the documentary series‘ own archive, which has been partly released online, and sources unexplored by the series, such as queer journals and official reports. From these stories, different narratives emerge, in which homonormativity is imposed by the Icelandic state and National Church in the 1990s and conceded by Iceland’s National Queer Organization, resulting in a registered partnership legislation that some homosexual Icelanders saw not as a victory but as a loss of power. The contrast between these stories and those of People Like That foregrounds the politics of remembrance and forgetting and exposes the seldom discussed conditions for Icelandic homosexuals‘ inclusion into the nation in the 1990s.

KEYWORDS:

• Iceland
• queer history
• collective memory
• homonormativity
• neoliberalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This work is part of a research project, supported by RANNÍS, the Icelandic Centre for Research, called „From sexual outlaws to model citizens: The relations between queer sexualities and nationality in Iceland“. It includes two PhD-projects. One, of which this article is part, focuses on the conditional inclusion of the model gay cititzen into the Icelandic nation 1990–2010. The other focuses on discourses of AIDS, foreignness, and nation in the 1980s and early 1990s (see Hafsteinsdóttir, forthcoming). All translations in this article are mine.

2. A note on Icelandic names. The traditional Icelandic naming system is patronymic, meaning that there are no surnames. Referring to an Icelander solely by patronym is incorrect, as this merely tells us the name of that Icelander’s father (or, increasingly, mother). A traditionally-named Icelander is referred to either with both given name(s) and patronymic or, when context allows, with given name(s) only.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Icelandic Centre for Research [206625-051].

Notes on contributors

Thorsteinn Vilhjálmsson

Thorsteinn Vilhjálmsson (born 1987) is a scholar and translator, currently working on his PhD in History at the University of Iceland. He has BA-degrees in Latin and Greek from the University of Iceland and a MA-degree in Classical Reception from the University of Bristol. His research has focused on the history of sexuality, the reception of the classical world and queer history, on which he has written a number of articles. He has published a book of poetry translated from Greek and Latin (Mundu, líkami: Óritskoðuð grísk og rómversk ljóð. Reykjavík: Partus Press, 2016) and edited the nineteenth-century diaries of Ólafur Davíðsson, a queer Icelandic scholar (Hundakæti: Dagbækur Ólafs Davíðssonar 1881–1884. Reykjavík: Mál & menning, 2018).