CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | van Kalkeren, Christine Geertruida |
|---|---|
| Title | Difference and Collectivity: The Amsterdam Queer Movement as a Moral-political Project |
| Summary | This dissertation investigates how difference and collectivity coexist – and sometimes clash – within the Amsterdam queer movement. While Amsterdam is globally recognized as a pioneer of sexual liberation, this study reveals how internal conflicts shape the movement’s politics and identities. In this dissertation, difference between participants within this social movement is understood in two ways. First, difference in social location, produced through the intersection of dimensions like race, gender, sexuality, and class. This difference in social location brings with it specific experiences, interests, and inequalities between people and groups regarding power and privilege. Second, difference in understandings of the queer movement as a moral-political project, meaning the different interpretations people have of what the queer movement should look like, what political goals it should focus on, and what forms of activism it should follow. These different interpretations are grounded in people’s moral frameworks, and constructed in a relational way, with people making judgments about their own and others’ activism. Using interviews, observation, and textual analysis as the main research methods, multiple movements and organizations – the Pride Amsterdam Foundation, We Reclaim Our Pride, Queer Amsterdam, Black Pride, the theatre production Becoming, but also governmental institutions like the municipality of Amsterdam – and the relationships between them, were studied. Although the two types of difference – in social locations and in understandings of the queer movement as a moral-political project – are connected, the central argument made in this dissertation is that it is important to make a distinction between them, as it allows us to better understand conflict within a social movement like the Amsterdam queer movement. Conflict in this movement is not only related to people’s different experiences and interests but is also associated with the existence of multiple moral-political subjectivities, with different understandings of activism and politics. Especially the opposition between, on the one hand, single-issue LGBT activism and, on the other hand, queer activism – in which multiple political causes are connected – and intersectional activism – in which there is an acknowledgement of power differences within a movement and an active attempt of creating space for marginalized groups and making the movement more inclusive – is salient in this field. However, this dissertation shows how contestation and conflict within the Amsterdam queer movement do not simply create fragmentation but can produce new relations of collaboration and collectivity as well, which can ultimately bring about change and transformation. This is, the dissertation argues, partly due to people’s ‘ethical freedom’ to reflect on both their social location and the potential privileges attached to it, and on their moral frameworks in which their understandings of the queer movement are embedded. The changes flowing from this ethical freedom have informed a politicization of the Amsterdam queer movement, and a move from single-issue LGBT activism to intersectional queer activism, in which ‘difference’ is understood as something that does not need to be ‘overcome’ in order to create unity, but as exactly the thing that binds people together. |
| Supervisor | Naumescu, Vlad; Geva, Dorit; Renkin, Hadley Z. |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/kalkeren_chris.pdf |
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