For this year’s Pride Month, the Elephant in the Room podcast welcomes Elisa Heinrich, historian and Max Weber Fellow. In conversation with Giuseppe Zago, EDI Officer, she reflects on the questions that connect her work across gender history, queer history, and disability history.
Elisa begins by examining how history is written, whose experiences are treated as central, and whose are sidelined or framed as an “add-on”. Fields such as women’s history, queer history, and disability history may appear, at first glance, as subfields, but they do more than document marginalisation and othering. They also reveal the processes through which heterosexuality, masculinity, and able-bodiedness are constructed as unquestioned norms. As she notes, “the main problem is not that these [history] books talk about men, but that they do it without saying so, so they normalise the male experience. The same is with heterosexuality and able-bodiedness”.
Drawing on her PhD research on intimate relationships between women in the German women’s movement around 1900, Elisa challenges the idea that there is one fixed or universal form of normality. Despite legal and social restrictions surrounding homosexuality at the time, many women lived in long-term relationships with other women that were visible, respected, and considered normal within their own circles. These examples illustrate that norms are not stable or universal; rather, they are constantly contested, negotiated, and reshaped by different groups and actors. This perspective leads her to question the usefulness of applying present-day categories such as “homosexual” or “lesbian” to the past. Instead, she develops intimacy as a broader framework for analysing affective ties, relationships, and shared lives.
Language and the politics of naming emerge as another key focus. Elisa reflects on how terms such as “homosexual”, “lesbian”, or “cripple” have historically carried pathologising and derogatory meanings, while also being reclaimed by activists as tools of emancipation. Reclaiming such terms, she suggests, is a way of stripping harmful language of its power, linking historical practices to contemporary forms of activism. This attention to language also brings into focus current attempts to erase or depoliticise terms related to equality, gender, sexuality, racism, and social justice. Elisa draws parallels with authoritarian strategies of linguistic control, warning that banning certain words not only targets political concepts but also undermines the visibility of the groups they describe. She argues that activists and institutions should resist the shift towards neutral or depoliticised language, and instead insist on naming inequality, bias, and power relations clearly.
The episode also highlights the close relationship between activism and knowledge production. Elisa emphasises that social movements have played a crucial role in shaping fields such as gender studies, queer studies, and disability studies, often producing knowledge from the perspective of those directly affected. This raises important questions about epistemic authority, reflected in the disability rights slogan “Nothing about us without us”. For Elisa, this principle challenges academic research to involve communities more directly, make knowledge more accessible, and avoid extractive approaches that do not give something back.
In doing so, the conversation also rethinks common assumptions about activism. Rather than being limited to demonstrations, flyers, or protest signs, activism – particularly in disability history – has taken many forms since the 1970s, including writing, artistic and performative practices, documentaries, and interventions in public debate. Recognising these forms allows us to see people with disabilities as political actors and knowledge producers in their own right.
Throughout the episode, Elisa offers a nuanced reflection on history, language, activism, and the power to define what counts as normal. By historicising categories and centring experiences that have often been marginalised, the discussion invites listeners to rethink identity, knowledge, and the possibilities of resistance.
To explore these perspectives further, Elisa recommends Sebastian Meise’s film Great Freedom, which examines the persecution of homosexual men during National Socialism and in post-war West Germany. The film stands out, for her, in its refusal of a simple narrative of linear progress, instead capturing the complexity, fluidity, and uncertainty of sexual identities across time.
Listen to the episode on:
YouTube
Episode details:
Host: Giuseppe Zago, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the EUI
Guest: Elisa Heinrich, historian and Max Weber Fellow
This initiative was produced in collaboration with the EUI's researcher-led web radio, Radio Cavolo. Do you have a question about the podcast? Drop a line to radiocavolo@eui.eu or edi@eui.eu.