This project has received funding via the EUI ESR call 2026, dedicated to Early Stage Researchers, with the contribution of the EUI Widening Europe Programme. The EUI Widening Europe Programme initiative, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.
The last two decades has seen a rapid increase in scholarly works on decentring Western sexualities and thematising sexuality in Eastern, East-Central, and South-Eastern Europe. Recent publications have grappled with the intersections of sexuality and gender, race/ethnicity, class in the region. Still, these works often highlight the differences of European regions, strengthening the ‘exceptionalism’ narrative around Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Scholars have importantly emphasised the specificities of socialist and post-socialist contexts with those of Western Europe, yet SASME project proposes a space to consider these histories in conversation with one another.
Second, histories of sexuality have tended to emphasise a clear dichotomy between ‘bottom up’ and ‘top down’ perspectives, creating a binary between ‘the state’ and ‘citizens’ often presented as a binary between ‘the state’ and its antagonists, those engaged in activism or contending the ‘lived experience’. This has produced narratives of expertise and policy ‘from above’ and others addressing the resistance and intimacies ‘from below’. Our project challenges this dichotomy by looking at how sexual politics have been formed both through statutory and non-statutory intervention. By challenging these prevailing approaches, SASME aims to explore the ways that sexuality was not peripheral but constitutive to European state-building, shaping how states imagined citizenship, morality and belonging. By bringing together research on multiple European countries, including Greece, Hungary, and the United Kingdom, we foreground how sexual politics, whether through reproductive policies, public health and education, feminist activism or AIDS campaigns, emerged through interactions between citizens, experts and state institutions
The project therefore seeks to answer the following research questions:
- How we can integrate the history of sexuality, sexual politics and sexual governance in late twentieth-century Europe into a coherent, transnational analytical framework?
- How did histories of intimacy, reproduction, and moral regulation shape Europe’s broader transformation from authoritarianism and state socialism to democracy and neoliberal governance?
For more information about the EUI Widening Europe Programme, please visit the official webpage.