GLOBINTERSECT - Global perspectives on intersectional histories

Anti-immigrant sentiments are often spurred in Europe today by sweeping depictions of Muslim refugees as homophobic and young men from the MENA region as sexist. At the same time, struggles against racism and against socio-economic injustices are pitted against one another (woke vs left). These tensions decisively contribute to the polarisation of European societies.

The point of departure for the project is the recent publication of several studies that look at gender, queerness, disability, residence status, and other markers of difference from a global or transnational history perspective. Instead of singling out one aspect of diversity, GLOBINTERSECT follows an intersectional approach: how were different logics of discrimination interconnected? With this question in mind, the project looks at transregional and transcontinental connections and disconnections since the early 19th century. Thereby it picks up on a number of pioneering works that have addressed the interplay between race, class, gender, and sexuality in colonial settings.

The primary question is not how globalising dynamics increased or decreased diversity and intersectional complexity. Rather, the project traces how configurations of diversity and modes of intersectionality shifted with global connections and disconnections. Were people who had to cope with intersectional discriminations more or less likely than others to engage in transnational communication and traverse national borders? What difficulties were anticipated, and encountered, by people who moved between places where they were discriminated against due to a certain characteristic and places where they were not? Did education play a role in this?

With these questions in mind the project will look at race, ethnicity, gender, class, age, disability, displacement, and other markers of difference. It will employ quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the interstices between global and local settings, generalisable and particular aspects, and integrating and diversifying dynamics. GLOBALINTERSECT directs attention to processes of diversification and to modes of dealing with it from a bottom-up as well as from a top-down perspective, thus charting a new field of historical research.

Building on the grounds laid out by the principal investigators, the participants develop a common conceptual framework that analyses histories of globalization from an intersectional point of view. This framework discusses flows and disjunctures between local, regional, and global levels; the agency of groups and individuals in co-shaping the glocal scapes they move through and live in; the socio-cultural construction of the categories under consideration, like race, gender, class, age, sexuality, disability; and how subjective and structural dimensions, micro and macro perspectives are intertwined in intersectional global histories. The participants apply this framework in twelve individual projects that cover various regions and periods within twentieth-century Europe. These empirical insights will help to further refine the conceptual framework of GLOBALINTERSECT.

Individual projects

• Zsombor Bódy: Intersectionality across classes and denominations. Women's activism in Hungary in the first half of the 20th century
  My research investigates the lives of women who were involved in autonomous women's organisations and movements, i.e. single-sex movements. Single-sex women activism is interesting for the research precisely because it responded to institutionalised male dominance. One aim of the research is to follow the process of the formation of these movements, associations, etc. Women’s movements were global phenomena in the first half of the 20th century, but they are imbued in every country with different meanings and interpretations from one social stratum and denomination or religion to another. The research tries to assess how women’s activism varies according to social strata, and religious groups. In the context of the Hungarian society such analyses need to consider, on the one hand, the upper- and middle-class women’s activism compared with that of the working-class women, and on the other hand Christian and Jewish women’s activism. The investigation is based on periodicals of women’s movements and the ego documents of the protagonists of the field of women’s activism. This allows me to pursue the second aim of the research: to trace of processes of transnational networking and glocalisation of the transnational ideas of women’s movements in Hungary. The main actors of the field of Hungarian women’s activism have been imbedded in transnational networks, and so they were acting both transnationally and locally. What can be called glocalisation is the process that places global discourses into local social and cultural frameworks.
• Csenge Kondorosy: Narratives of Belonging. Exploring the relationship between social stratification and women's place attachment
  Due to globalisation and major changes in the social structure, people's relationship with their environment has undergone a huge transformation. I capture this experience through the interdisciplinary concept of place attachment. In my research, I explore the relationship between the (seemingly) more subjective place attachment and the position in the social structure.
  I explore the former through qualitative in-depth interviews conducted in a peri-urban village as part of a longer fieldwork, and the latter mainly through census data, which provides a basis for examining long-term trends. The theoretical and methodological gap between lived experiences and macro-level changes is bridged by the concept of social position, the complexity of which is captured by intersectional approach. As a focal point of research, the social position sees the individuals both from "the outside" (the perspective of statistics), and from "the inside" (the perspective of their narrated experiences). My research investigates the relationship between (1) the narratives of women, (2) the "facts" that emerge from these narratives – i.e. the signs of their place in local society – and (3) the characteristics that emerge from the statistical data.
• Uladzimir Valodzin: A model Stalinist city seen under a queer angle. Minsk in the 1952 diary of Kaspars Aleksandrs Irbe
  Kaspars Aleksandrs Irbe (1906-1996) was born, raised and lived almost all his life in Jurmala, a seaside town in the vicinity of Riga, Latvia. He left a very detailed diary. This diary, after it became available to researchers several years ago, turned out to be a very rich source of information on everyday life, but also on Riga's homosexual subculture, of which K.A. Irbe was a participant. In 1952, K.A. Irbe spent three months in Minsk, Belarus. His diary from this period is a unique source on the gay men milieu of Minsk. Otherwise, Minsk has a reputation of a model Stalinist city, dull and thoroughly 'sovietised'. Irbe's diary undermines this picture and opens up a sackful of Minsk's secrets.
• Magos, Gergely: Neurasthenia. A global medical concept in Hungarian medical discourse and practice
  Neurasthenia was a typical male mental illness in the late 19th and early 20th century. I would like to analyse this term from two different aspects.
  On the one hand, I will present the original concept of neurasthenia, which was described as a typical Yankee male disease by American George Beard and was associated with modern civilization and intellectual jobs. The main focus of my research is on how this term was implemented in Hungary. Since it was almost exclusively considered a male disease, it could be a good counterpart of hysteria. Using this term, we can analyse gender stereotypes, roles and how masculinity was seen at that time. Neurasthenia implied, however, a medicalisation of male sexuality: the regulation of onanism, the medical description of impotence, or premature ejaculation.
  On the other hand, I investigate the medical cases from “Lipótmező”, which was the main asylum in Hungary. We can not only explore medical practice, but also reveal the everyday experience of masculinity and male sexuality by analysing patients’ narratives.
• Kiss, Zsuzsanna: Singlehood in a glob-intersectional perspective
  My research investigates singlehood in a global and intersectional framework, encompassing it from the conceptual level to the realm of lived experiences. Singleness (as well as the social discrimination of singles, i.e. ‘singlism’) is a timeless global phenomenon, however, it is imbued with different meanings and interpretations from one era and country to another. One aim of the research is to follow the process of the transformation of the general concept into norms and values accepted at the level of society. This is what I call the glocalisation of singleness. In doing so, I can also assess how singlehood is intersectional, how it "varies according to gender, age, class, religion, ethnicity, ableness, sexual orientation, or other axes of social differentiation" on the societal level (Lahad 2017: 3). In the centre of the research, there is a diary written in 1938-1939 by a 30-year-old single, wealthy, and religious woman. This allows me to pursue my second aim: a further change of scale in the investigation. The diary as a base enables the exploration of how the glocal understanding of singleness is represented as an individual condition.
  The concrete field of investigation is thus the urban, religious, upper-middle-class, female late singlehood, but the results will be interpreted (in the sense of glocalization) by placing them back into the social and global framework. The diarist's experiences will help to reconstruct how the normative system of society (1) fits into the global discourse and (2) how it transmits its values to its members among the various constraints preserved by the structures of the society.
• Keller, Márkus: Female architects in the socialist public sphere.
  One of the great promises (of many) of the socialist system was to treat men and women as equals. Even if the promise of equality turned out to be false, it is hard to deny that after 1945 careers traditionally reserved for men were opened up to women in droves. This is true even if it is not necessarily due to socialism alone, but also to the general process of social modernization that was taking place throughout Europe.
  Architecture was one of the fields opened to women. Women were admitted to the Faculty of Architecture at the Technical University of Budapest as early as 1927, but full and unconditional equality was not achieved until 1946.
  In my research, I am looking for answers to the question of what public roles women architects could choose in Hungarian socialism, and how they appeared in the press as architects and as women. I am not investigating what kind of architects they were, nor am I evaluating their work, but I am analysing the image of them in the public sphere of the period. I am interested in the relationship between femininity and professionalism in architecture. This question is particularly fascinating from a global perspective, as it has been raised in both socialist and capitalist systems, but it seems that both society and women have developed different responses to this problem in different systems.
• Gammerl, Benno: Generating sexual and racial alterity. Global mobilities and the life-stories of West German gay men.
  In the contemporary history of homosexualities there seem to be two possibilities for the intersection between racist and hetero-sexist discrimination. The homonationalist paradigm depicts primarily migrants from predominantly Muslim countries as queerphobic and pits sexual against racial minorities. Such enmity between vulnerable groups has been described as horizontal hostility. The opposite pattern highlights solidarity between marginalised communities instead, based on the assumption that their shared experience of discrimination entices them to help others in similar situations. The project explores the complexity of the various real-live scenarios that unfold around the intersection between racism and hetero-sexism in the context of different forms of global mobility. It shows that this complexity reaches far beyond the simplifying opposition between hostility and solidarity.
  Based on oral history interviews with same-sex desiring men from West Germany who were born between 1935 and 1970, the project asks in which ways racialised and orientalised others figure in these narratives. This brings into view deprecative attitudes as well as sexoticising imaginations. But stories about travelling and about encounters with migrants also contribute in decisive ways to how the narrators form their gender and sexual identities. Analysing these interviews from the point of view of global mobilities reveals the often-contradictory ways in which racist and hetero-sexist hierarchies co-shaped, intensified or attenuated one another.
• Karolina Koziura: Diasporic Counter-Archives. Insights from an Intersectional Comparative-Historical Sociology
  Following the Second World War, waves of East European refugees created community organizations across Canada and the United States. From Edmonton and Toronto to Cleveland and New York, dispersed refugees came together to reckon with their experiences and reclaim their authority over their often erased past. Whether in the case of Poles and Ukrainians after the Second World War, Czechoslovaks after Prague Spring of 1968, or Hungarians after the Revolution of 1956, political refugees from Eastern Europe quickly mobilized and organised cultural institutions in a new emigrant reality. Although these grassroots organizations came to play an essential role in the communal lives of East European refugees, they remained an understudied aspect of Cold War-era transnational cultural politics. What role did these institutions play in sustaining diasporic identities and politics? How did they interact with host societies and other diasporic institutions? More importantly, how did they inform the twentieth-century narratives of violence circulating between East and West? My project addresses these questions by analysing transformations of diasporic mobilizations, inclusions, interactions, and institutions through intersectional lenses. In particular, by looking at the role of objects, like documents, books, memoirs, and photographs, it asks about the role of, what I call, “diasporic counter-archives” in triggering common as well as divergent diasporic identities and politics.
  This project hopes to bridge ways in which historians and sociologists think about intersectionality by looking at the experiences and perspectives of largely marginalized East European diasporic communities within the North American setting. It contributes to the perception of diasporic identities as dynamic and evolving through intersections of social status, class, gender, and ethnicity. It further draws attention to the role of art and recordkeeping as ways of challenging historical erasures as well as tools of community building.

Events

• On 17 June 2024 the GLOBALINTERSECT participants met for a first workshop in Budapest. Here we began discussing the draft framework paper and some of the individual projects.
• On 7 and 8 October 2024 a second workshop will take place in Florence:
• Towards the end of the year, we will organise an online event where we ask experts working in related fields for their comments and questions about our conceptual framework.

For more information about the EUI Widening Europe Programme, please visit the official webpage.