Preliminary Programme

Wed 23 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 24 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 17.30

Fri 25 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 26 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

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Wednesday 23 April 2014 8.30 - 10.30
P-1 SEX01 Biography and Sexuality in the Twentieth Century: Methodological Problems for the Historian
SR 1 Geschichte first floor
Network: Sexuality Chair: Geertje Mak
Organizer: Mark Cornwall Discussant: Geertje Mak
Mark Cornwall : Conflating Homosexuality and Treason: the Case of Colonel Redl
Notorious is the case of Colonel Alfred Redl who before 1914 betrayed Austro-Hungarian military secrets to the Russians, supposedly blackmailed by the Russians because of his homosexuality. Partly because of the fragmentary evidence, the Redl case has been subject to many fictional interpretations in the 20th century (film, theatre and ... (Show more)
Notorious is the case of Colonel Alfred Redl who before 1914 betrayed Austro-Hungarian military secrets to the Russians, supposedly blackmailed by the Russians because of his homosexuality. Partly because of the fragmentary evidence, the Redl case has been subject to many fictional interpretations in the 20th century (film, theatre and literature) and has also served as a case study of supposed ‘homosexual risk’, exploited by intelligence services to exclude homosexuals from their activities. This paper revisits the archival evidence on the Redl case and explores how the material was subsequently distorted in the interwar period by vested interests (including the Austrian army). It also seeks to critique recent interpretations (including the celebrated study Oberst Redl by Verena Moritz and Hannes Leidinger), where the homosexual dimension to the case has been given only a superficial analysis for a popular audience. The result will be finally to subject the Redl case to a queer reading, and demonstrate how the case’s homosexual dimension has been negatively stereotyped not only in 1913 (as synonymous with treason) but in subsequent decades as late as the 1980s. (Show less)

Dan Healey : What Goes on Tour: the Queer Diary of Soviet Singer Vadim Kozin
Vadim Aleskeevich Kozin (1905?-1994) shot to Soviet stardom as a singer of apolitical “gypsy romance” songs during the height of Stalin’s Terror and then the Great Patriotic War. In 1945 he was imprisoned in the Gulag forced labour camps of Magadan in the Far East for his homosexuality and supposed ... (Show more)
Vadim Aleskeevich Kozin (1905?-1994) shot to Soviet stardom as a singer of apolitical “gypsy romance” songs during the height of Stalin’s Terror and then the Great Patriotic War. In 1945 he was imprisoned in the Gulag forced labour camps of Magadan in the Far East for his homosexuality and supposed anti-Soviet sentiments. Released in 1950, he struggled to rebuild his career, topping the bill on tours of Siberia with the Magadan Musical Theatre in 1955-1956. His diary recording eighteen months “on tour” during these years offers a tantalizing glimpse of the everyday life of a Siberian superstar with a queer eye for the Soviet guy. At the same time, the diary raises troubling questions for the historian of the Gulag queer; yet the diary still offers exciting opportunities for the historian alert to the existential questions for Soviet queers that it poses, and for the ways in which it anticipates the politics of queer visibility in today’s Russian Federation.
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Clare Tebbutt : Diagnosing Absence: the Risks of Using Medical Case Studies as Biography
As Judith Butler clarified after accusations of reducing trans* lives to the level of the symbolic, and as trans* theorists such as Ki Namaste have argued, those who fall outside gender norms are not just ciphers for wider theories, they have lives that matter. The people in my research into ... (Show more)
As Judith Butler clarified after accusations of reducing trans* lives to the level of the symbolic, and as trans* theorists such as Ki Namaste have argued, those who fall outside gender norms are not just ciphers for wider theories, they have lives that matter. The people in my research into understandings of ‘sex change’ in 1930s Britain do not neatly fall under the rubric of trans* but the issue remains of their lives acting as conduits for wider medical claims. The medical case studies, published by their surgeon, Lennox Broster, in his co-edited book, The Adrenal Cortex and Intersexuality (1938), with their accompanying photographs, portray patients, people whose lives are mediated by a medical gaze. The case studies are examples of medical narrativisation – the medics present these life histories as knowable narratives that revolve around, and are resolved by, medical diagnosis. How can the historian approach this medicalisation of biography, whereby individuals’ lives become communicated through medical discourses? How can lives, glimpsed in moments of vulnerability, as Creighton et al and Dreger have discussed in relation to the medical photography, be told as more than symptoms and a diagnosis or as figures of fascination to be mined for their queer historical significance? What biographical accounts can be forged from subjects who become understood through medical treatment that may or may not be desired? The activist group Intersex Initiative stress the importance of intersex people’s lives and experiences beyond the confines of their being intersex. How can these important activist concerns be honoured when the lives in question defy current labels, and the subjects’ broader life experiences are absent?
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Theo Van Der Meer : Constructing a Biography of Pieter Meertens
This paper analyses the challenges faced by the historian of writing a biography of the Dutch Pieter Meertens (1899-1985), especially in view of his religious and mystical efforts to pursue a special type of homosexual identity based on abstinence.Pieter Meertens was the founder of the
study of folklore in the Netherlands, ... (Show more)
This paper analyses the challenges faced by the historian of writing a biography of the Dutch Pieter Meertens (1899-1985), especially in view of his religious and mystical efforts to pursue a special type of homosexual identity based on abstinence.Pieter Meertens was the founder of the
study of folklore in the Netherlands, who also happened to be gay. He was
among other things convicted for sex with a minor (innocently he always claimed). As a young man he pursued celibacy and used mysticism and mystical images (especially that of the beloved disciple John at Jesus's breast) to create the identity of a chosen one. The paper explores notions of brotherhood and reconciliation, placing Meertens in the context of others like Edward Carpenter. (Show less)



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