Vol. 29 No. 1 (2024): Sex at the Borders: Queering Transnational Histories

RESEARCH ON QUEER HISTORY often focuses on national contexts. This special issue rather contributes to the field of transnational histories of sexuality and explores contacts and movements within and between Nordic and Baltic contexts. To consider local sexual histories as by necessity translocal, the issue moves across the Finnish Gulf between Estonia and Finland (Põldsam & Taavetti), further across the Gulf of Bothnia between Finland and Sweden (Juvonen), then across the Sweden–Norway border at Hälle on European route E6 (Larsson) and finally circles back to Finland (Paasonen & Pajala). Read together, these articles suggest that sexuality offers an intriguing basis for rethinking the relations between the national and the transnational and their connections to libidinal intensities, sexual politics and world-making. They provide a somewhat unusual map of recent histories of sexuality, which through constant movement across borders – be they geographic, legislative, moral or desirous – figure and refigure national contexts and their interconnections in partly novel ways.