QLAIM · Claiming ‘Sexual Minority’: A Transnational Political History, 1921–1981.

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Project objective

Claiming ‘Sexual Minority’: A Transnational Political History, 1921–1981 [QLAIM] challenges the established historiographical premise that the political concept of the ‘sexual minority’ originated in the post-1945 United States. QLAIM instead locates its roots in early 20th-century East-Central Europe (ECE) and traces its transnational dissemination over subsequent decades, offering a new genealogy for modern queer politics. The project hypothesises that this emergence in ECE was no coincidence: it drew on local nationalist imaginaries, particularly the interwar concept of ‘national minorities’, most prominently Germans in Czechoslovakia and Jews in Poland. Defining (homo)sexuality in analogy to ethnicity and nationality set in motion consequences that continue to reverberate today. On one hand, it enabled homosexuals—long pathologised by medicine and criminalised by law—to claim protected status as members of a distinct community. On the other, it allowed nationalists to cast the ‘sexual minority’ as alien within the nation, producing a homophobia framed in nationalist terms and echoing antisemitic and xenophobic tropes. QLAIM combines extensive multilingual archival research (Czech, German, Polish, Slovak, English) with interdisciplinary training at the University of Antwerp, deploying digital tools (corpus analysis, network visualisation, digital history) to map and disseminate the transnational circulation of ‘sexual minority’ as a cultural and political concept. Recovering this history matters today: across Europe, minorities face persistent hostility, increasingly articulated in nationalist language. Psychologists call this chronic strain minority stress, theorised in 1981 with reference to sexual minorities, yet reflecting wider mechanisms of exclusion. QLAIM’s importance lies in showing how the interwar history of ECE holds the key to understanding sexual minority politics and the roots of nationalist homophobia, both in the region and beyond.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

• UNIVERSITEIT ANTWERPEN · AntwerpenCoordinatorBelgium

Links

• View on CORDIS
• DOI: 10.3030/101285692