LGBTI Emancipation in Comparative Perspective

In August 2016 the city of Amsterdam will host Europride. In the two days preceding the canal parade an international scientific conference will take place in collaboration with the Amsterdam Research Center for Gender and Sexuality (ARC-GS) of the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and its partners. The conference takes Europride as an occasion to question and compare the state of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) emancipation within Europe.

This two-day conference will offer a space to reflect from different European contexts on gains made in the fight for LGBTI rights as well as blind spots and pitfalls encountered on the way. The focus of the conference will be on tracing developments regarding LGBTI politics throughout Europe from various perspectives and disciplines from the social and behavioural sciences, the humanities, and law.

Sylvia Holla (researcher at Atria) and Renée Römkens (director/CEO at Atria) organise Panel 14: More labels or no labels? An interdisciplinary panel on “creating space” for gender ambivalence and diversity .

Abstract:

Gender scholars have long argued that the binary concepts male-female fail to capture the rich variation of gender and sexual subjectivities that exists, and that both biological and gender identities occur across a continuum of possibilities (cf. Van Heesch, 2015). Increasing awareness of these variations amongst medical practitioners and politicians has recently led to a request for legislative amendment in the Netherlands: the demand to reconsider the binary gender system of juridical sex-registration, with only two boxes to tick: male or female. This corresponds with countries like Nepal, India, New Zealand, Germany and Australia, where arrangements are or have been made that go beyond the traditional dichotomy of male/female. However, manners of providing space for gender variation vary cross-nationally. In the Netherlands and Germany the dichotomy M/F is maintained, but it is made possible to refrain from either label for a considerable period of time. In India and Nepal, a “third gender” is officially recognized by the government: a box other than male or female is provided (Van den Brink and Tigchelaar, 2014: 46-50). A question that arises, is whether and which changes in legislation on sex-registration are effective in rendering gender ambivalence and/or diversity culturally accepted. Will more labels, or rather, no labels, lead to social inclusion and a broadening of cultural norms? This panel proposes an interdisciplinary approach to ambivalent and diverse gender identities – a topic situated at the intersections of law, health and gender studies, and the social sciences. We invite participants from these various fields to think about different strategies of subject-positioning that may benefit people with ambivalent gender identities. What are the possible ways, apart from juridical ones, to render gender ambivalence and diversity more socially and culturally accepted? We also encourage scholars to discuss specific cases, social spaces or institutions where gender ambivalence is (increasingly) culturally accepted or even artistically celebrated (one can, for example, think of domains of pop music, entertainment or the higher segments of fashion, see Davis, 1994; Taylor, 2012).

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