Highlighting auto/biographical practices in western and eastern, old and new or future parts of Europe, the essays in this volume discuss the construction of individual, cultural and political identities within a changing landscape from the late eighteenth century until the present. This publication contains a selection of reworked papers presented at the international conference ‘Life Writing in Europe’ (2009) that was the starting point for the network IABA Europe (http://www.iaba-europe.eu)
This volume addresses three things: God, sex, and politics. It investigates what is at stake in these constructions of religion and homosexuality in public discourses. Starting with the Netherlands as a special case study, it proceeds with contributions on other predominantly postsecular countries in central, northern, and southern Europe as well as several postcommunist and postcolonial countries ’beyond Europe’. Combining contemporary and historical perspectives and approaches from both the humanities and the social sciences, the contributors explore how national and European identities are constructed and contested in debates on religion and homosexuality. [Chapter 2 and Chapter 8 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.]