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, starting in the late 1970s and 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 and Nordic equality paradise. 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 reports by the state and the National Church on homosexuality from the 1990s. From these stories, different narratives of Iceland‘s recent past 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.