[ecrea] CFP : Communist Homosexuality (1945-1989) - International Conference

« COMMUNIST HOMOSEXUALITY (1945-1989) »
International Conference

2-3 February 2017, Paris
Université Paris-Est Créteil, CRHEC

Facebook page : https://www.facebook.com/eastqueerconference/

Main Conference Issues

Warsaw, 1985: The Polish People's Republic's Secret Police initiated 
Operation Hyacinth (Akcja "Hiacynt"), a political action designed to 
inventory all the names of homosexuals — and of their relatives — in 
Poland. During a two year period, a list of 11.000 people was compiled. 
Under the guise of a medical/public health rationale, within the context 
of policing the proliferation of HIV/AIDS, this initiative resulted in 
increased state surveillance of sexual minorities. In reaction, it 
encouraged sexual communities to organise and push for greater sexual 
emancipation — both rejecting their blackmail and defining a legitimate 
role within a changing Polish civil society. This action was only one 
example of a broader spectrum of sexual politics that composes a recent 
history of homosexuality in the former communist states. Our symposium 
seeks to write and interrogate this history and its contemporary 
lineages, which encompass the U.S.S.R, the "People’s Democracies" 
(G.D.R., Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria) and 
Yugoslavia, from the end of the Second World War until the fall of 
Communism.

This writing of a history of Central-Eastern European homosexualities 
since 1945 will involve drawing out and examining both communist themes 
and disparate national trajectories: juridical, political, social, 
cultural and artistic. There is clear evidence of national differences 
in these histories: same-sex relations are, for example, decriminalized 
in Hungary in 1961, whereas legalization of such relations happened long 
after the fall of communism in Romania, in 1996. This considerations 
reflect broader differences in political background — Ceaușescu’s 
Romania being very different than Kàdàr’s and subsequent Governments in 
Hungary.

These political histories will have to take into account how sexual 
policy and politics are shaped throughout the communist period by the 
requirement of keeping alive a so-called "socialist order". Whether in 
different regimes or through different dissenting texts such as Maxim 
Gorky on “disorderly sexual life” (1934), homosexuality had been seen as 
inconsistent with this order much of the time. This incompatibility 
didn’t exist during first years of Soviet history, and through early 
Soviet policy and the works of such as Alexandra Kollontai, though it 
become progressively denied throughout most of the communist period. An 
extended political history is still to be written by taking into 
consideration everyday life for homosexuals under communism, alongside 
different forms of policy, where criminalizing over-visibility (and its 
ostracism) usually collapsed into a multiple theatre, combining shadows 
of desire to lights of inclusion. Within this history of compatibility 
and incompatibility, homosexuals were not only victims, but also actors 
of socialist order.

Social and cultural dimensions to life under communism can be added to 
the political history, by following the traces of lesbian and gay 
community, by exploring their meeting spots (bars, half-private circles, 
cruising areas), by studying homosexual organisations that emerge in the 
1980s. This encourages the examination of strategies of mise en présence 
of homosexual body in the social space.

The conference will be largely focused on artistic fields along with 
considerations on media and communication. In novels, films and their 
imagery, homosexuality arises here and there within regimes where 
censorship on what could be seen or spoken of never actually ceased 
(yet, with several nuances depending on the context). How could an image 
of a homosexualized body be produced? How could homosexuality transpire 
in the words of fiction? How can we analyse the recent theory proposed 
by Wojciech Śmieja wherein no “homosexual literature” exists in spite of 
several references to the subject in Polish novels? And what did 
artistic productions during this period represent among the homosexual 
community? One of the goals of the conference is to understand the 
complex relationship — induced by the finding of a homosexual 
possibility — that connects Socialist states, individuals and artistic 
productions.
Shedding light on this multilayered history involves questioning today’s 
accessible sources, as rich as delicate to manipulate, such as 
monitoring reports, historical memory processes elaborated since 1989, 
and the unending body of artworks. Though the issue of archives is 
particularly sensitive, not only because their sources concern a 
minority composed arbitrarily, but because this minority defines itself 
by matters rarely enunciated: desire, love, intimacy. We consequently 
wish to open a space of research that deals with a mise en forme of a 
discourse, hardly stated by homosexuals themselves, often born in a 
limbo of legal detours and social negotiations.

Besides, we think it is necessary to question the biopolitical 
dimensions of Eastern European homosexualities. To write their social 
history and to consider their artistic translations are two processes 
that can be completed through a philosophical approach. It is possible, 
if not necessary, to mobilize philosophical theorizations from this 
period (in particular those of Michel Foucault) and also some more 
recent ones, in order to question the political dimension of homosexual 
intimacy. More precisely, we want to interrogate the polysemous concept 
of “body”, in other words, understanding: 1/ how the homosexual person 
was reached by laws in his or her physicality, 2/ to what extent the 
historicized frames (political, moral, religious) shaped and 
acknowledged the existence of homosexuality, but condemned it at the 
same time by creating a range of prohibitions and, above all, 3/ to what 
point homosexuals before 1989 could search for a truth about themselves 
and assert their desire in the public space. This philosophical 
dimension leads to many questions: Was there a “homosexual corporeity” 
that was specific to socialist Europe? If so, what were the models? In 
what extent can we observe a continuity between the affirmative search 
of a truth about oneself and the visualization of desire? And around the 
1980s, in what way did AIDS shake up the imbalance between biopolitical 
management and the existing forms of homosexual intimacy having the 
treatment of the “problem” lurking in the background?

Finally, we would like to put the problem of the communist homosexuality 
in two broader perspectives. First, to consider it in the vast history 
of relationships between men and women in socialist times. Communist 
societies were deeply affected by gender definition, as many works have 
recently proved: the access of women to wage-earning labour, the way 
women were encouraged to conquer positions in different spheres of 
activities or the demand to educate persons outside the family sphere 
were different advances which moved gender frontiers (sometimes in 
unexpected shifts). To what extent was the homosexual experience 
affected by this? How can we use the communist experience to think more 
generally about the articulations between gender relationships and 
homosexuality? Contributions of scholars from the field of gender issues 
will be much appreciated. We have the same kind of questioning about 
sexuality at the socialist time. Those regimes promoted, sometimes 
simultaneously, repressive prudishness, interest in a “healthy” 
sexuality (that was supposed to make people more satisfied, and 
therefore more obedient and more productive) and considerations about an 
undefined sexual blossoming. How did homosexuality confirm or challenge 
the approach of sexuality in these socialist contexts?

Secondly, communist homosexuality will be put in a larger geographical 
context. If scholars have been writing the history of European 
homosexualities for more than ten years, their focus rests mostly on the 
Western protagonists and ignore their Eastern European counterparts and 
their communists pasts. With this conference, we do not want to compare 
systematically what happened in the West and the East; neither we want 
to see Eastern Europe as the eternal poor imitator of its Western 
neighbour, nor to read its history of homosexuality as the expectation 
to catch up with the Western history — expectation that the fall of the 
Wall would finally make possible; such a perspective is irrelevant to 
understand what happened before 1989 (and also what has happened after 
1989). Notwithstanding the above statements, exchanges with Western 
Europe, circulations and migrations (whether temporary or definitive) 
will be nonetheless inevitable topics.

We hope the discussions will open a general reflection about models, 
corporeity, languages, and about the social and political structures 
where homosexuals found a zone of repression and expression at the same 
time. In the present, when gay movements have obtained some rights and 
when new forms of homophobia appear in Eastern and Western Europe, 
viewing the history of contemporary homosexuality in another context 
than the one that is most often analysed (the liberal and bourgeois 
regimes) can be a way of challenging some certainties, of transforming a 
memory into a new history and to construct a critical history of 
differences at European scale.

Submission  &  Timeline

Submissions for papers (500 words max.) written in English or French, 
along with a short biography (5 lines max.), should reach us by June 25, 
2016 at the latest.
Acceptance/rejection will be notified on the 11th of July.
Please send abstracts to: (eastqueerconference /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(eastqueerconference /at/ gmail.com)>.

We encourage submissions from researchers in disciplines across the 
humanities and social sciences (sociology, philosophy, film studies, 
media and communication studies, political sciences, etc.), and we will 
pay particular attention to proposals from doctoral students and young 
doctors.

Transportation and accommodation of participants may be taken in charge 
by the conference’s budget, partly or totally, in the case financial 
conditions allow it.

Scientific board : Prof. Dr. Éric Fassin (Université Paris 8 Vincennes 
Saint-Denis, France), Prof. Dr. Dina Iordanova (St Andrews University, 
Scotland, U.K.), Dr. Hadley Z. Renkin (Central European University, 
Budapest, Hungary), Dr. Florence Tamagne (MCF, Université Lille 3, 
France), Prof. Dr. Judit Takács (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 
Budapest, Hungary)

Conference team :
Jérôme Bazin (Associate Professor, Université Paris-Est Créteil, CRHEC) 
: (bazin.jerome /at/ wanadoo.fr) <mailto:(bazin.jerome /at/ wanadoo.fr)>
Mathieu Lericq (PhD candidate, Aix-Marseille Université, LESA) : 
(mathieu.lericq /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(mathieu.lericq /at/ gmail.com)>


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