Transnational sexual health activism and Aids in Western Europe, 1980s-1990s

The proposed project offers the first comprehensive study of the link between sexual health activism dealing with Aids in Western Europe in the 1980s and 1990s and the transnational flows of people and ideas in this region and era. It examines the following specific questions:

1. What was the nature and impact of transnational flows of people and ideas in Western Europe on individual and collective sexual health activist subjects dealing with Aids?
2. How were these transfers filtered through the sociocultural and political conditions that were prevalent in the diverse locations in question as well as through the varying social backgrounds of sexual health activists?
3. To what extent and how did sexual health activism encourage the cross-border movement of individuals?

The project deals with three levels of analysis: a) individual activists b) groups of sexual health activists and c) the broader context, namely the debates in which those activists were involved at the local, national and transnational level, interacting with doctors, social workers, policymakers and other activists.

The main hypothesis of the proposed project is that the cross-border transfers in question helped create a dynamic field of interaction and conflict among activists in Western Europe. This process led to a cross-fertilisation of ideas and protest patterns that sexual health activists addressing Aids employed across Western Europe. Moreover, the project intends to show the hitherto underexamined link of sexual health activism dealing with Aids with cross-border migration. The project argues that such activism was shaped by migration and served as one of the reasons, besides work and study, why queer individuals in particular relocated from Southern Europe to the UK and the Federal Republic of Germany. In this vein, the project enriches research on activism dealing with Aids in Western Europe, which has mainly explored its unfolding within nation-states in the 1980s-1990s.

The project investigates the convergence and the conflicts that the transnational interaction of sexual health activists involved. It aims to show that such conflicts pertained to the differing social and political background of those activists. The relevant scholarship has mostly examined gay activists addressing Aids-related issues. However, the proposed research explores campaigners who varied in terms of sexual orientation, gender identity, social class, 'race', age, location and ideology. Their diverging backgrounds contributed to sexual health activists dealing with Aids endorsing differing perceptions of activism and sexuality. Crucially, as the project intends to show, they often disagreed on the need to follow 'safe sex' norms as well as whether the 1980s marked an era of sexual repression. Thus, the project provides a socially and politically differentiated periodisation of understandings of sexuality in the 1980s-1990s. Recent research on sexuality offers a nuanced narrative of this era as not being the anti-climax of sexual changes in the 1960s-1970s. However, it has ignored facets of the differentiated periodisation that this project illuminates, such as the conceptions of sexuality that migrant sex worker activists embraced.

The project also targets subjects beyond academia. First, it intends to help acquaint people aged circa 18-25 years with the history of subordinated groups, especially sex workers, who have struggled against their Aids-related stigma. Second, it is useful for policymakers, journalists and teachers dealing with migration in the Federal Republic of Germany and the UK. The project aims to help familiarise them with pioneering approaches to the relations between migrants and the non-foreign-born population. These approaches do not define integration as simply an adaptation of migrants to the receiving society. Instead, they counterpose the mutually beneficial interaction between migrants and the non-foreign-born Germans and Britons.