Project description
Uncovering the hidden history of sexual minorities
Did the political concept of the sexual minority really begin in post-war America? Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the QLAIM challenges this common belief by tracing its origins to early 20th-century East-Central Europe. The project reveals how early activists borrowed from interwar nationalist ideas like those concerning ethnic minorities in Poland to claim legal protection. However, this comparison also allowed critics to frame sexuality as ‘alien’ to the nation, fuelling a form of nationalist homophobia that still resonates today. Using multilingual archives and digital mapping, QLAIM explores how these concepts travelled across borders. By recovering this transnational history, the project provides vital context for understanding modern exclusion and protecting minority rights in Europe today.
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.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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2000 Antwerpen
Belgium
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