Christopher Zraunig

Publications

Zraunig, Christopher (2025). Scham, Verfolgung, Freiheit?. Queeres Altern im historischen Kontext. In: Miranda Leontowitsch/Ralf Lottmann/Christina Dülfer/Smilla Henning/, Queeres Altern (27-52). Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473900-0

My dissertation examines how LGBTQ+ inclusion is pursued in German eldercare through diversity initiatives, housing projects, and care certification programs, asking what these efforts can and cannot repair after long histories of exclusion, criminalization, and neglect. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin and other German care settings, it shows that diversification can create real forms of safety, recognition, housing access, and community for queer elders, while also turning “diversity” into an institutional good that is managed through bureaucracy, funding structures, and market logics. The project argues that repair and injury are not opposites but often coexist within the same care infrastructures, and it traces how desires for dignity, intimacy, belonging, and ongoingness both exceed and reshape the institutional terms through which eldercare attempts to include queer lives.

My ethnographic play method uses verbatim theatre to re-center the words of interlocutors and to engage performance not simply as a means of representing social life, but as an ethnographic and analytic practice in its own right. Working against the monologic conventions of much anthropological writing, it creates space for multiplicity, emotional complexity, and forms of social knowledge that are not fully captured by retrospective description alone. By staging speech, affect, and relational intensity, this method allows me to attend to experiences of precarity, intimacy, and possibility in ways that resist analytical closure and invite a more immediate, multidimensional encounter with institutional and everyday life. I use this method in my dissertation, which also features an interlude on the play as method.