Conference team: Jérôme Bazin (Université Paris-Est Créteil, CRHEC) and Mathieu Lericq (Aix-Marseille Université, LESA)

Time: 2-3 February 2017
Venue: Université Paris-Est Créteil, CRHEC
Proposals by 25 June 2016

Warsaw, 1985: The Polish People’s Republic’s Secret Police initiated Operation Hyacinth (Akcja „Hiacynt“), a political action designed to inventory all the names of homosexuals — and of their relatives — in Poland. During a two year period, a list of 11.000 people was compiled. Under the guise of a medical/public health rationale, within the context of policing the proliferation of HIV/AIDS, this initiative resulted in increased state surveillance of sexual minorities. In reaction, it encouraged sexual communities to organise and push for greater sexual emancipation — both rejecting their blackmail and defining a legitimate role within a changing Polish civil society. This action was only one example of a broader spectrum of sexual politics that composes a recent history of homosexuality in the former communist states. Our symposium seeks to write and interrogate this history and its contemporary lineages, which encompass the U.S.S.R, the „People’s Democracies“ (G.D.R., Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria) and Yugoslavia, from the end of the Second World War until the fall of Communism. Read more and source … (Web)