Project Details
Projekt
Human rights, queer genders and sexualities since the 1970s
Applicant
Professor Dr. Martin Lücke
Subject Area
Modern and Contemporary History
Term
from 2017 to 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 259250500
Justice drives movements and movements drive justice. This is true too for the right to a self-determined sexuality as is demanded by the LGBTQI* community. This right and its foundation in human rights was an early demand of the homosexual collectives of the Federal Republic Germany and worldwide. The central question of this project is: which collectives were involved in the mobilisation of these individual rights and which debates, conflicts and practises accompanied it. In this way, we are contributing to the central question of the research group, since normative concepts of sexuality are always inscribed in the contested general. The way how the new common comes into being was also of interest for LGBTQI* movements. To this end, the project begins by examining how the German lesbian and gay groups have tried to include the demand for sexual self-determination into human rights debates. Central in this context is how the trans-national organisation ILGA (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association) represented legal demands and how these in turn influenced national debates. The strategies used by ILGA are just as interesting as the changes to the conception of gender and sexuality in these processes. The analysis of these transnational interconnections helps us to understand not only the historiography of human rights but that of the queer movements as well. Secondly, the project examines the legally constituted area of education in Germany. This perspective is linked to a hitherto unwritten history of self-organisation of counselling and educational offers for LGBTQI* youth--that is, the legal dimension of educational initiatives, above all of the lesbian and gay movement. In this case, human rights come to the fore in two ways: on the one hand, the actors had an understanding of themselves explicitly as human rights activists and legitimized their political goals by referring to human rights. On the other hand, they designed their emancipatory educational concepts based on the concept of human rights education. The project therefore makes an important contribution to the current contemporary debates on the cultural history of law, the interrelationships between national and transnational legal discourses and the history of the queer movements.
DFG Programme
Research Units
