Kalender des Seminars für Geschichte und Geschichtsdidaktik

INTIMACY ON THE MOVE. BODIES, ECONOMIES & DESIRES ACROSS THE LONG 20^TH CENTURY

International workshop, 7 & 8 July 2025, TAL 007.

Organisation: Benno Gammerl (European University Institute, Italy), Nikolaos Papadogiannis (University of Stirling, UK), Christiane Reinecke (Europa-Universität Flensburg, Germany), Ulrike Schaper (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)

In recent years, historians and other scholars have become increasingly interested in exploring the multi-fold ways in which histories of sexualities, and mobilities intersect. Our workshop aims to contribute to this emergent research on the interplays between intimacies and mobilities by shining a light on the various ways in which economies influence the intimate practices of people on the move. Our primary objective is to delve into how broader economic structures, like the various manifestations of capitalism, including racial capitalism and state socialism, as well as economic practices and the material conditions of historical actors on the move have influenced their bodily and affective practices and vice versa.

In order to cover a wide range of national, imperial and postcolonial contexts, the workshop brings together international scholars working on different regions and different types of mobilities, like tourism and labour migration. In their papers, they attend to the various ways in which historical subjects navigated, were shaped by and, in turn, influenced different sexual and mobility regimes.

Programme

Monday, 7^th of July 

9:30 to 10:00 Coffee & Arrival

10:00 to 10:45 Welcome and Introduction (Benno Gammerl, Nikolaos Papadogiannis, Christiane Reinecke & Ulrike Schaper)

Coffee

11:15 to 13:30 Panel I: Working Bodies and Labour Relations

Chair: Nikolaos Papadogiannis, Stirling, UK

Poorva Rajaram, New Delhi, India, Bodily Efficiency and the New Indian Employee in Late Nineteenth Century Colonial India 

Chelsea Schields, Irvine, USA, Corporate Fantasy, National Angst: Migration and the Sexual Economy of Oil in the Caribbean

Somak Biswas, Cambridge, UK, Bodies and Borders: The Female South Asian Immigrant Labour in Britain, 1970-1990

Lunch

15:00 to 16:30 Panel II: "Trafficking": Economies and Interventions

Chair: Sébastien Tremblay, Flensburg, Germany

Franziska Exeler, Berlin, Germany, Female Migration, Sexual Trafficking, and Economic Networks in the “Three Empires’ Corner”

Sarah Frenking, Erfurt/Potsdam, Germany, “Mädchenhandel”. State-organised Mobility for Prostitution in World War II

Coffee

17:00 to 18:30 Panel III: Sex Work

Chair: Benno Gammerl, Florence, Italy

Mona Rudolph, Kiel, Germany, Trade of Intimacy: The Economic and Social Dynamics of Prostitution and Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Christopher Ewing, West Lafayette, USA & Ulrike Schaper, Berlin, Germany, Travel, Intimacy, Transaction: West German Shifts in Politicizing Sex Work and Tourism in the 1970s and 1980s

Conference Dinner

Tuesday, 8^th of July 2025

9:00 to 11:15 Panel IV: Tourist Economies 

Chair: Christiane Reinecke, Flensburg, Germany

Anita Buhin, Lisbon, Portugal, Seduction and Economy: 'Galebovi,' Romance Tourism, and Power Dynamics in Socialist Yugoslavia

Javier Cuevas del Barrio, Malaga, Spain, Developmentalism and Decolonisation of Bodies during Franco’s Dictatorship in Spain

Lauren Stokes, Chicago, USA/Hamburg, Germany, The Monosexual Alps, the Bisexual Mediterranean? Locating Bisexuality in the European Imaginary

Coffee

11:45 to 12:30 Final Discussion