Queer Liberation across East-Central Europe, 1900-1950

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

Over the past decade our understanding of LGBTQ+ lives in 20th century East-Central Europe has been slowly transformed. While Anglo-American historians have supplied ground-breaking research, regional scholars with a queer eye have critiqued traditional historiography and sources, providing a solid basis for assessing LGBT lives from both national and comparative perspectives. Rather than referencing US or German developments as touchstones for a queer understanding of this space, the new LGBT history seeks to study East-Central European queer lives on their own terms. It underlines the agency of native activists and the regional peculiarities that have shaped the positive or negative experiences of queer individuals in the evolving geopolitical spaces. This historiography has also been stimulated or provoked by present-day East European regimes and their (often homophobic) stance on LGBT rights.
This roundtable takes stock of current knowledge and the potential for future research. We will focus on ‘queer emancipation’ in the first half of the 20th century in four regions: Romania (Dima), Czechoslovakia (Cornwall), Hungary (Kurimay) and Poland (Karczewski). Our key themes are: (1) the state of current research and each panellist’s contribution in their region of expertise; (2) the potential of our historical sources; (3) the characteristics of each region that informed how queer lives could be lived (the law, society and sub-cultures, gender politics, policing); and how these evolved across different regimes; (4) a comparative assessment across East-Central Europe, to place the four regions in a broader geopolitical context across the half-century.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Kevin Moss, Middlebury College

Roundtable Members

• Mark Cornwall, U of Southampton (UK)

• Ramona Dima, Södertörn U (Sweden)

• Anita Kurimay, Bryn Mawr College

• Kamil Marcin Karczewski, U of London (UK) / U of Warsaw (Poland)