Preliminary Programme

The late 1960s and the early 1970s are often understood to be a period of sexual liberation. In this paper, I will focus on private experiences of those who faced adolescence during these years when public attitudes towards sexuality were changing. I am interested in the descriptions of embodied adolescent femaleness and maleness in the context of sexuality and relationships. My analysis concentrates on how being a young female or a young male and having a relationship were represented in sexual autobiographies.

The autobiographies I will analyse were collected by Finnish sociologists Osmo Kontula and Elina Haavio-Mannila, who conducted a writing competition called Sexuality as an Integral Part of Human Life in 1992. The researchers received 166 stories. Kontula and Haavio-Mannila have grouped the writers of the biographies into three generations. Their analysis has concentrated in finding differences and similarities between these three groups, and as sociologists, their focus is in the present day. Most of the writers who were adolescent in the 1960s and early 1970s are grouped into the generation of sexual revolution. Because of this, changes occurring during these years cannot be noticed. I will therefore analyse the biographies more closely. To match the timescale of changes in public discourses on sexuality, I will analyze the anonymized biographies of writers who were from 12 to 17 years of age in 1960–1975. Altogether 64 texts met the criteria.

I will also compare these private experiences to public discourses. I have previously analysed relationship ideals represented in Finnish sexual education leaflets and a popular music magazine’s articles and advertisements. During the 1960’s, a general shift towards stressing the importance of togetherness and shared interests of the partners can be seen in all of these sources. Being at the same wavelength and making decisions together were depicted more often than before. In the context of stable relationships, premarital sexual activity was accepted and even expected as a sign of love. I am now interested in finding out whether the same can be observed in the private experiences as memorized in the sexual autobiographies. When do changes in sexual morality occur and how do the changes affect the writers’ self-image? Do especially the adolescent females consider themselves respectable if being sexually active? How do the writers describe their relationships? (Show less)

Who were the experts on sexuality in the Scandinavian countries? What kinds of sexual knowledge have been important to the sex experts, and how have the sex experts presented themselves in the media? I will discuss the figure of the sex expert in Scandinavia from the 1930s to today by analyzing biographies, advice columns, popular books and photographs/portraits of different sex experts.
Many (but not all) of the Scandinavian sex experts were sexologists. Janice M. Irvine has described sexology as an ‘umbrella term denoting the activity of a multidisciplinary group of researchers, clinicians and educators concerned with sexuality’. Both clinicians and educators were crucial in the Scandinavian Popular Journal for Sex Education (Populært Tidsskrift for Seksuell Oplysning), which was initiated by the young Norwegian medical doctor Karl Evang in 1932. Many of the sex experts who wrote in the journal, as well as later experts, have written for a Scandinavian public. Tracing the Scandinavian sex expert can be an example of entangled history: Popular advice literature by experts such as Max Hodann (Germany/Norway/Sweden), Karl Evang (Norway), Inge and Sten Hegeler (Denmark), Maj-Brith Bergström-Walan (Sweden), and Malena Ivarsson (Sweden) have been published in one or two of the neighboring countries, and some experts have had advice columns in newspapers in two countries.
James Secord has underlined the importance of studying knowledge in transit. The sexual knowledge that will be discussed has circulated geographically (between the countries), but also socially as the sex experts popularized theoretical knowledge. In the 1930s Karl Evang was clearly influenced by Freud and psychoanalysis. In his sexual health manuals published after the war he embraced Kinsey’s large-scale sex research. Freud and Kinsey represent two very different, but also typical, forms of sexual knowledge: The therapist who builds his theory based on patients’ narratives, and the statistical scientist who bases his theory on large samples of the population. Following the Kinsey reports statistical surveys of people’s sex life was conducted in Scandinavia. They revealed new knowledge on sexuality, and social scientists conducting such surveys appeared as a new type of sex experts.
Pictures of and interviews with some of the most well known Scandinavian sex experts can tell us how the sex experts have been presented in media. Although Evang was a political radical figure, he presented (and considered) himself as a man of rationality and science. Maybe to counter allegations of “sexualism” he referred to a stable, married life. The playful sex-expert seems to be a creation that appeared in the aftermath of the 1960s sexual revolution and along with the development of the tabloid press. (Show less)

Even though the sexuality is often an important part of life, it is seldom a main topic of personal narratives collection campaigns. And when not asked directly, the respondents of the collection campaigns rarely describe in detail their sexuality. Memories of feelings and experiences that do not follow the heterosexual norms, which are in one way or another queer, are particularly difficult to find from collections of personal narratives.

This presentation aims to describe and analyze how queer memories of desire are made visible and hidden in Finnish and Estonian personal narratives collections. The presentation uses close historical reading of both the personal narratives and the documents describing the collection campaigns. Documents of the campaigns help to contextualize and place historically the ways in which diverse memories are being produced.

Both Finland and Estonia have a strong tradition of collecting, preserving and researching personal narratives and other writings by common people. These vast collections offer interesting insights on how remembering queer living has been made possible in these countries. Societies with different histories and different archival and research traditions produce diverse understandings of queer lives.

The presentation will focus on the personal narratives by post-WWII generations and also aim for generational comparisons as well as to consider how other features besides generation affect the memories. The aim is to answer, for the part of the personal narratives collections, how do the time of living, the time of writing, and the time of reading affect the remembering of sexuality. (Show less)