September 12th—14th, 2002
Sexuality, Lower Class Milieus, and Workers' Movement
The public announcement of this year's Linz Conference and
the invitation for presenters in the form of a Call for Papers resulted
in a broad range of academic disciplines and scholarly approaches, in addition
to the internationality usual at the ITH conferences. The papers received
illustrate the wide range of scholarly research on the topic of sexuality
and the lower classes, not only in research topics but also in methodological
approaches. During the two days of the conference, scholars from twelve
countries and from various disciplines such as history, anthropology, sociology,
human geography or legal philosophy, presented their research results and
in so doing conveyed an impression of the current state of sexual research
and historical writing.
The first of a total of seven panels arranged according to content focus
which was titled "Concepts" delivered a theoretical basis for
the explanations that followed by providing an examination of sexual identities
in combination with queer theory (Elisabeth Holzleithner, Austria) as well
as a convergence between Marxist theory and modern concepts of sexuality
and sexual identity (Paul Reynolds, United Kingdom).
The second panel occupied itself with the organized "Workers' Movement and Sexuality." June Hannam and Karen Hunt (United Kingdom) clarified the positions of British Socialists to sexual politics in the 1920's. David Berry (United Kingdom) portrayed the French political activist Daniel Guérin, who made analogies between the oppression of the working class, Afro-Americans, colonized peoples and the discrimination of homosexuals.
A further block of topics covered "sexual education" in the form of advising centres in the first half of the 20th century (Stephen Bajohr, Germany). Lena Lennerhed (Sweden) worked out the interconnectivity of sexuality within the discourse of hygiene and medicine and in the context of sexual reforms in Sweden. A central point was the question of the relationship of bourgeois moral conceptions to the workers' movement as Britta McEwen (USA) showed in a study of the sexual education of children in Red Vienna. Elisabeth Perry (USA) thematicised the border between the protection and control of working class girls through bourgeois social reformers on the example of American dance halls at the beginning of the 20th century.
In the panel about "Generativity" and Reproduction,
the discussion was about economic pressures and population policy questions,
the most important factors in the sexuality discourse of and about the lower
classes. Anelia Kassabova-Dintcheva (Bulgaria) analysed "Generativity"
in Bulgaria as an institutional discourse in the field of conflict between
political measures and social processes. One paper shed light upon the perspective
in films at the time of the Weimar Republic, in which abortion was brought
into the connex between personal tragedy and degradation, and in which the
complex experiences of women who were confronted with the decision of having
to have an abortion was cut out (Cornelie Usborne, United Kingdom). The
influence of bourgeois values in relationship to contraception was discussed
in detail by Jutta Schwarzkopf (Deutschland) in a paper about cotton weavers
in Lancashire at the end of the 19th century.
The second day began with the fifth panel about "Sexuality and the
Work World" where sexual relationships were discussed with regard to
hierarchical positions in the workplace on the basis of two concrete examples
from China and the United States (Minjie Zhang, China und Stephen Meyer,
USA). A broad temporal and comprehensive content curve from the 19th to
the 20th was spanned by Anne-Marie Sohn (France) about the sexual history
of the milieux populaires in France. Joan Isabel Sangster (Canada) made
analogies to the racist tendencies of sexual control in colonial context
for the Canadian lower classes in a comparison of aboriginal and working
class girls. A further topic area covered the knowledge about sexuality,
contaception, and venereal disease of jute workers in India (Raja Chakraborti,
India).
In the panel about "Marginalised Sexualities" the content was, on the one hand, the contradictions between the representation of queer ways of life and the workforce such as, for example, the paper by Jon Binnie und Beverly Skeggs (United Kingdom) about the gay district in Manchester and on the other hand, the thematisation of prostitution under the historical conditions of (post-) colonialism. P. Swarnalatha (India) illustrated the literary discourse over the two century transformation of the dancing girls from mistresses to despised prostitutes in Andrah, India. Mustafa Abdel Rahman (Egypt) examined the sexual relationships of young Egyptian men to female foreign tourists from the perspective of colonialism, globalisation and male-female relationships. In the discussion which followed, and which was continued after the seventh panel, the necessity of casting off the one-sided view of prostitutes as victims of societal conditions in order to arrive at a more differentiated analysis of the main protagonists involved was confirmed.
The last panel of this conference titled "Revolution and Sexuality" included five papers about countries in which a new ordering of society brought about a change in sexual norms. Lubov Kusnetsova (Russia) and Berthold Unfried (Austria) spoke about sexuality and politics in Russia in the 1920's and 1930's. Ruth Gutermann (Austria) delivered a discourse analysis of the sexuality debate in anarchist periodicals in Spain. Narges Erami (USA) dealt with the introduction of the Islamic temporary marriage in the course of sexual legislation in Iran after the 1979 Revolution. Jafari Sinclaire Allen (USA) thematicised male sexualities in Cuba. The comparison of societies with Socialist and Islamic Revolutions, despite all of their differences, makes clear the mechanisms with which sexuality can be instrumentalised in order to exercise power. Among other things, it was shown that the discourse about sexuality always means a claim to power by those speaking and that speaking about sexuality in historical transformations can be interpreted as a revolutionary act.
The contributions presented illustrated in their totality
the stretching of the bordaries and differences in the scholarly confrontation
with sexuality. The academic view of sexuality is predominately problem-oriented,
and an analysis of the power structures inherent in gender, race and sexuality
appears to avoid positive connotations. In the negative aspect concentrated
approach, one conference participant believed she had found a commonality
with the history of the workers' movement. Nevertheless, the approaches
of queer theory have crystallised into a way out of a standardised and control-directed
perspective of the history of sexuality. Not least, queer studies is of
great importance because of its inherent subversive potential. The deconstruction
of dichotomous sexual identities makes it possible to look at the individual
ability for action of those involved and to be able to write a "history
from below" in a positive and subject-oriented manner.