Thursday 14 – Saturday 16 March 2019

Cruising the Seventies: Imagining queer Europe then and now explores cultural expressions of LGBTQ struggles across Europe in the 1970s, asking what queer histories of this decade might offer in the political present.

The decade that lies between the early expressions of Gay Liberation in the US in the late 1960s and the onset of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the early 1980s occupies a central place in the imaginary of queer politics and the histories that are told of it. Across Europe in the 1970s expressions of queer sexuality manifested unevenly. Through legislative changes, organised rights movements, and counter-cultural practices, LGBTQ individuals and groups emerged into tentative public visibility informed by anti-colonial struggles and in exchange with the Women’s Liberation Movement.

The burgeoning of an emergent LGBTQ politics in this period was shaped through cultural expressions. The circulation of manifestos, experimental literature, film and art, and the aesthetic dimensions of political activism, all represent crucial forms through which queer life was lived and imagined. Revisited through the lens of the present, cultural expressions of LGBTQ activism in the 1970s allow a discontinuous history of queer visibility to appear, one that has been variously mythologised and marginalised, its political possibilities limited, subsumed, and opened out. At a time of uncertainty in Europe we hope to excavate these unrealised possibilities of queer pasts.

The conference is free to attend and open to all. Please book tickets for each day you intend to join us.

For the full programme and accessibility details, visit www.crusev.ed.ac.uk.

Venues:
Thursday 14th March
2.30pm - 6.30pm - Wee Red Bar, Edinburgh College of Art, 74 Lauriston Pl, Edinburgh EH3 9DF
8pm - 9pm - Stills, 23 Cockburn St, Edinburgh EH1 1BP
Friday 15th March and Saturday 16th March
10am - 7.30pm - Traverse Theatre 2, 10 Cambridge St, Edinburgh EH1 2ED