Growing up on the shores of Lake Michigan in Bridgman, Michigan, Finn Enke witnessed first-hand the environmental hazards impacting the Great Lakes during the late 1960s following the development of a nuclear power plant.
“We were one of the first properties next to the plant,” says Enke, a professor of history and gender and women’s studies. “Our house had been hundreds of yards away from the lake, and we watched as the lake got closer and closer to our home.”
Due to the environmental issues raised by the chemical and thermal discharges from the plant into Lake Michigan, Enke remembers their parents becoming environmental activists. They were also concerned about the construction of structures from the plant that were causing erosion and the lack of regulation around the developments.
“At the time, there was no effective regulation of any of those matters and no incentive for energy producers to figure out how to produce energy without dumping toxins into the watersheds and massive amounts of heat into the environment,” Enke says.
Beyond green initiatives, Enke’s parents were also involved in the Vietnam anti-War movements expanding throughout the country. As they witnessed the movements taking place first-hand, Enke was growing up before the notion of transgender was defined or truly accepted.
“That larger environmental story, the anti-war movement, knowing myself as a transgender person and feeling my future being taken away from me — these stories were inseparable,” Enke says. “It was this feeling of impending extinction.”
Enke’s experiences growing up are reflected in the research, teaching and educational endeavors they have taken on throughout their career.
Enke was originally hired at UW–Madison to help create the undergraduate LGBTQ+ studies certificate program, which they eventually became the director of. Before the program’s creation, there was an increasing number of professors teaching queer content as student interest rose. As a result, Enke and others involved in the program wanted to meet that interest.
“This is something really important, and people should have an opportunity to learn about it,” Enke says. “If they don’t have an opportunity to learn, it’s not just that they’re missing that learning, but they’re getting a very skewed perspective on human life.”
Since the program’s inception, more professors and students have become involved with the curriculum. The program consistently sees more than 40 students graduate with the LGBTQ+ studies certificate in a calendar year, according to Enke.
Much of Enke’s early research focused on social movements throughout history, including the history of gender, sexuality and queer movements. Once Enke realized that queer content was not adequately taught, they shifted to look at history through the lens of gender, sexuality and identity.
While researching and teaching history with this perspective, Enke found that there was an intersection between most historical periods and gender and sexuality due to the prevalence of identity in human interaction.
For example, during fall 2019, Enke taught topics on sexual identity and transgender activism in Weimar, Germany, in their History 364 course. Specifically, Enke’s class investigated cross-dressing in Weimar and how it ignited transgender civil rights movements.
Enke’s history classes seek to understand movements in history — such as the Civil Rights Movement — with an emphasis on gender and sexuality.
“It’s really recognizing that the history of sexuality is intimately and integrally a facet of literally everything else we can think of,” Enke says. “I think that it’s interesting to see over time, how gender diversity looks across different communities.”
Currently, Enke is working on a graphic memoir regarding their life on Lake Michigan, experiences with social movements and growing up transgender in the late 1960s. The memoir’s graphics reflect the perspective of a child, as Enke wanted it to accurately represent growing up. Enke also incorporated colors accurate to the period in which the memoir takes place.
Enke’s interest in stories stems from earlier research on the history of feminist, queer, lesbian and women's spaces in Midwest urban areas where they relied on oral histories. These showed the importance of telling stories and listening to one another, Enke says.
“Stories are one of the things that connect us most, and the most important thing in the human world is listening to each other,” Enke says.
The oral history projects also led Enke to experiment with other mediums, such as art and graphics, as a form of storytelling.
While Enke has found art to be one of their preferred methods of expression, Enke also encourages students to experiment with different mediums to identify how they want to communicate effectively.
“I’m always thinking about the ways that the work historians do is primarily creative, even when we’re aiming for accuracy,” Enke says. “I’m inviting students to think about these different mediums for understanding things and figuring out how to communicate with each other.”