Wannes Dupont, “The ‘Invention’ of Homosexuality in Belgium”
Wednesday, 16 March 2016, 20:00-22:00 CET
Universiteitsbibliotheek: Doelenzaal
Singel 425
1012 WP
Amsterdam
For about four decades now, homosexuality’s late nineteenth-century’s “invention” has been considered as one of the most defining moments in gay history. That this happened more or less simultaneously across the West, however, is an unhelpful generalization based on the situation in only a handful of countries. The evidence from less well-studied countries, by contrast, suggests that even within Western Europe national chronologies and local circumstances varied more widely than is hitherto acknowledged. In Belgium, for example, no significant public or scientific debate about sexual inversion emerged prior to the mid-1950s. This lecture will attempt to summarize why the issue was avoided at a time when it was eagerly explored abroad. In the final analysis, it will be argued, even the controversial work of the novelist Georges Eekhoud (1854-1927) failed to trigger the kind of analytic scrutiny that was turning homosexuality into a pressing social problem in neighboring countries like France, Germany, and the Netherlands.
Wannes Dupont is part of the Center for Political History at the University of Antwerp and the author of several contributions on the history of (homo)sexuality in Belgium. His recently finished doctoral dissertation investigates the striking lack of discourse concerning sexual inversion and perversion in Belgium prior to the Second World War from an internationally comparative perspective. He currently works on a new project about antigay politics in postwar Europe and will conduct research at the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities as a fellow of the Belgian American Educational Foundation next year.