{"id":40474,"date":"2026-06-12T01:56:56","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T01:56:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lesbianfunworld.com\/books\/?p=40474"},"modified":"2026-06-12T01:56:56","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T01:56:56","slug":"which-homosexuality-by-m-van-kerkhof","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesbianfunworld.com\/books\/which-homosexuality-by-m-van-kerkhof\/","title":{"rendered":"Which Homosexuality? by M. Van Kerkhof"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\r\n\r\n‘Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?’ takes its title from the question it refuses to answer simply. The 1987 International Conference on Gay and Lesbian Studies in Amsterdam gathered scholars across disciplines precisely because no single definition held\u2014and the proceedings document that productive disagreement in full.\n\n\n\n\n\nThe papers move across literary analysis, social science, history, medicine, religion, and cultural theory, each discipline bringing different assumptions about what homosexuality is and how it works. That range is the point. Contributors examine how sexual identity gets socially constructed, how it has been understood and experienced differently across historical periods, and how scientific and medical discourses have shaped\u2014and distorted\u2014lived experience. The interrogative title isn’t rhetorical; the collection genuinely declines to resolve it.\n\n\n\n\n\nLesbianism receives sustained and specific attention. Dedicated congress sessions address lesbian social life, lesbian literary representation, and lesbian theoretical frameworks\u2014a signal that by 1987, lesbian scholars had established enough institutional presence to demand their own intellectual space within the emerging field, even as questions about the relationship between gay male and lesbian scholarship remained live and contested.\n\n\n\n\n\nThe conference sits at a hinge moment: gay and lesbian studies transitioning from activist scholarship at the margins to institutionalised academic work, particularly in European universities. What was being theorised here about identity, culture, and politics would become foundational to queer theory as it developed through the 1990s. These proceedings are primary source material for that history\u2014documentation of how the field constituted itself, what questions it asked first, and which voices shaped its early frameworks.\n\n\n\n\n\nFor researchers in LGBT history, queer theory, and lesbian studies, this is the record of the room where much of it began.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n
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