Preliminary Programme

It was half a century ago last year that pope Paul VI promulgated the fateful encyclical Humanae Vitae in the summer of 1968. In so doing, he created a massive crisis of authority within the church, crushing the high hopes of millions of ordinary Catholics who had come to expect a relaxation of doctrine regarding conjugal morality and contraception after the Commissio pontifica pro studio populationis, familiae et natalitatis had voted overwhelmingly in favour thereof. The work of this commission during its final years and the way the pope ultimately chose to ignore its majority report has been fairly well-documented. Far less well-known, by contrast, are the circumstances surrounding the momentous commission’s inception in 1963, which had happened at the request of the Belgian archbishop and cardinal Leo-Jozef Suenens. A reformer, he had publicly called upon Catholic scientists around the world to undertake the study of reproductive issues several years earlier and he began been hosting the influential International Sexological Colloquia of Leuven from 1958 onwards.
By studying the transnational campaign for change in which he was of key significance, we learn that it was responding not only to a groundswell of despair among a Western lay community struggling with the ban on birth control and the baby boom’s burden of large families, but also to the Church’s active resistance to and successful sabotage of any and all WHO-sponsored population management assistance programmes to help alleviate the great hardships caused by rapid demographic growth in the ‘Third World’. In this paper I will demonstrate how the emergence of global population issues during the late 1940s and the 1950s sharpened the Church’s growing concern with sexual matters. I therefore rely on a wide range of sources, including the coverage of birth control issues in Informations Catholiques Internationales’s, Population, minutes of WHO meetings and of the International Sexological Colloquia of Leuven. (Show less)

In West Germany, as in many countries around the world, the advent of the “sexual revolution” led many to hope that the breakdown of barriers surrounding sex would implicitly mean heightened sexual pleasure. The simultaneous expansion of commercial jet travel made travel around the world, particularly to the Global South, in pursuit of exotic sex increasingly accessible to middle-and upper-class West Germans. However, as the 1970s wore into the 1980s, the promise of sexual pleasure remained unfulfilled while the allure of exotic locales remained. This paper will examine discourses of male homo- and heterosexual sex tourism between 1968 and 1995 to argue that for West Germans regardless sexual preferences, the sexual revolution generated deep ambivalences about sexual pleasure and the gender order, which were often mediated through discourses of sex tourism. Not only was 1968 a symbolic year in the history of the sexual revolution, but it was also the year that John D. Stamford created Spartacus Gay Guide, offering easier access for West German (as well as western European and North American) men to “gay” locales around the world. In the 1970s, sex tourism offered an escape from sexual frustrations in West Germany, which for some seemed to be exacerbated by a crisis of masculinity, the second wave of the women’s movement, and the commercialization of gay scenes. In the 1980s, with the onset of the AIDS epidemic, new concerns emerged around the intersections of sex, travel, and disease that at once reshaped how many West Germans perceived and even experienced sex tourism, deepening anxieties about racial difference yet failing to eliminate exoticized desire. This paper will end in 1995, the year that health scholar Dieter Kleiber issued a report that resolutely condemned German sex tourism as a source of HIV transmission in the Global South, significantly shifting discussions in the Federal Republic around sex tourism. Not only did the legacy of fascism and the resurgence of Christian conservatism shape how the sexual revolution unfolded in the Federal Republic, but West German sexual encounters with people of color around the world had deep implications for domestic sexual politics. This paper will bring into focus the global dynamics of West Germany’s sexual revolution through an examination of the connections between discourses of homo- and heterosexual sex tourism, integrating them into a larger history of sex, gender, and racial otherization in the Federal Republic. (Show less)

Although the end of the sexual revolution is usually imagined in the 1980s, in the Netherlands, we can simultaneously observe at that time an emergence of queer of colour politics and an intersectional debate on race and sexuality in activism and the academia. Drawing on descriptions of mati relationships in Suriname written in queer of colour periodicals, I turn to kambrada relationships in Curaçao. Kambrada relationships, like mati, are erotic relationships between women that can be traced back to the late nineteenth century. These relationships are described in verbs and adjective constructions rather than in identarian ones (women have kambrada relationships or do mati instead of I am a lesbian). This paper engages with the life and works of the late Curaçaoan born, actress, writer, activist, singer and theatre-maker Fridi Martina (1950-2014). Through articles and interviews conducted with her found in the archive and an interview I did with her ex-partner, I want to analyse variations of kambrada that circulated in the 1980s and 1990s. Through these interviews, I argue, we can see forms of same-sex sexualities that can be interpreted as a rejection of global (read Euro-US) idea of understanding sexuality and simultaneously a critique of imperialism. (Show less)

In the years following independence, the new nation of Côte d’Ivoire became the emblem of capitalist modernization in Africa. But while scholars have devoted much attention to the economic development projects that fueled the “Ivorian miracle,” few have considered the social transformations engendered by decolonization in Côte d’Ivoire. State officials positioned women as key agents in the “modernization” of Ivorian households, tasking them with projects ranging from education, to maternity, to public health and hygiene.

But as state actors championed women as selfless citizen-mothers, their plans neglected to account for the sexual revolution sweeping the capital. The “miracle” of postcolonial growth had ushered in vast economic inequality, and young Ivoiriennes were not always keen to privilege civic goals over their personal aspirations for material security. Drawing on newspapers, ethnographies, and literature, this paper shows how women in Abidjan inaugurated new sexual mores as they leveraged heterosexual relationships for love, money, or often both. For many, affective concerns regarding marriage and sexuality were deeply entwined with the desire to escape economic precarity. While other studies have painted them as mere pawns of capitalist development, this paper demonstrates the ways in which Ivorian women actively engaged with and occasionally defied state and societal expectations, drawing on the dividends of development to pursue their own visions of sexual liberation and personal autonomy. (Show less)

On 30 May 1969, the Dutch overseas territory of Curaçao erupted in anti-colonial revolt. In the years leading up to this dramatic insurrection, Antillean student-activists drew inspiration from other radical movements, including the Cuban Revolution and the US Black Power movement. In particular, activists in the Netherlands and the Netherlands Antilles celebrated aspects of the Cuban Revolution and Black Power for their purported ability to regenerate romantic love between men and women. Antilleans imagined that these insurgent acts of intimacy would offer vital contributions toward the liberation of minds and bodies in the global era of decolonization. Engaging over fifteen years of radical Antillean publications including Kambio, Vitó and Kontakto Antiyano, this paper considers the centrality of sexual politics to the radical imaginaries of Antillean leftists and explores the Atlantic currents that informed Antillean engagement with debates on gender and sexuality. While learning from Cuba’s purported ability to resolve the so-called “prostitution question” in the Antilles and taking up the language and imagery of Black Power to discuss the social and sexual subjugation of black women, Antilleans nevertheless arrived at ideas about revolutionary gender roles and eroticism that were distinct from Cuban articulations of the “New Man” or the Black Panther Party’s “brother on the block.” More still, Antilleans imaginative participation in the sexual revolution offers wholly new reasons for the politicization of sexuality at empire’s end. Unlike many contemporaries of the sexual revolution, Antillean leftists viewed sex as a site for radical political transformation precisely because of its historical connection to brutality, not pleasure. Illuminating the transmission of radical ideas about sex and gender across the Caribbean and Atlantic world, this paper reconceives both the substance and geography of the sexual revolution. While historians have often regarded the sexual revolution as a distinctly Euro-American achievement, I view the mid-twentieth century challenge to sexual mores as an Atlantic phenomenon born within creative critiques of colonial hegemony and anti-blackness. (Show less)