Sherine Berzig, Univ. de Cergy; Paul Durand and Quentin Trichard, EHESS; and Romain Jaouen, Sciences Po Paris (Web)

Time: 22.11.2024
Venue: Aubervilliers, France
Proposals by: 20.09.2024

This research workshop will explore new ways of writing the history of homosexuality using legal archives. It is open to all young researchers (doctoral students, young PhDs, authors of master’s theses) whose work falls within the theme. (The languages are French and English.)
Judicial material and the history of homosexuality: an encounter yet to come? The history of homosexuality, a growing field of enquiry in French academia over the past 20 years, has developed a paradoxical relationship with judicial material. While the legal framework for sexual encounters has been a central issue in historical reflections, the sources of judicial activities themselves – court decisions, judicial files, and others – have been singularly absent from the first major surveys devoted to love and sexuality between women and men. As early as the 1990s, historians expressed the ambition to write a „total“ history, capable of embracing the various dimensions of the homosexual experience (Tamagne, 2000). To achieve this, they built up large corpora of sources, including the press, written and oral testimonies, cultural productions, medical and legal writings, private and associative archives as well as public archives such as those of the police, but always leaving judicial archives at a distance (Merrick, 1996; Peniston, 2004; Revenin, 2005; Jackson, 2009; Pastorello, 2009; Buot, 2013). Beyond the French case, this can also be found in major European monographs (Cook, 2003; Benadusi, 2005; Houlbrook, 2005; Vazquez Garcia, 2011; Beachy, 2014; Kurimay, 2020).
The absence of these sources in French historiography is not entirely surprising. The notion of homosexuality does not have the same consistency in the French legal system which, unlike several others, did not explicitly criminalize homosexuality after the abolition of ancient criminal offenses such as sodomy. In Germany, Great Britain, Austria and Scandinavia, on the other hand, homosexual acts became (or remained) explicit criminal offenses after the modernization of criminal laws in the 19th century … read more (PDF).

Source: Gender Campus