GCSC KNL | Prof. Dr. Mari Jarris: What is Queer Marxism?

// Prof. Dr. Mari Jarris is a Provost New Faculty Fellow and incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies at Cornell University. Trained as a comparatist, they work across German- and Russian-language literature and theory, primarily in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their research areas include feminist and queer theory, transnational socialisms, utopian literature and science fiction, Marxist aesthetics, and Critical Theory. They have previously taught courses in Gender & Sexuality Studies and German Literature at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Middlebury’s German School, South Woods State Prison in New Jersey, and Princeton University.

Jarris’s current book manuscript, Utopia as Revolution: Marxism’s Queer Pasts and Futures, posits that utopia has been a site for theorizing queerness and Marxism together since the nineteenth century. It offers a counternarrative to the dominance of scientific socialism by tracing the transnational queer Marxism that emerges from a rereading of canonical German, Russian, and French socialist texts as utopian. At the same time, Utopia as Revolution seeks to expand the Marxist archive to include overlooked visions of polyamory, androgyny, the socialization of motherly care, and queer kinship. They have also begun a second book project that examines the literary and visual representation of queerness in the Weimar Republic and early Soviet Union against the backdrop of German and Russian colonialism, arguing that ethnoracial hierarchies were co-constitutive of “modern” queer identities.

Research Focus

• 19th- and 20th-Century German- and Russian-Language Literature
• Socialisms and Marxisms
• Feminist and Queer Theory
• Utopianism
• Critical Theory

Organised as part of the exchange between GCSC & Cornell University.