IHLIA Thesis Prize
For English scroll down
Voor Nederlands klik hier
Back to the homepage of the IHLIA Thesis Prize
On Thursday 21 March 2024, in a celebration at the Tolhuistuin, in Amsterdam, Diego Galdo González was awarded the IHLIA Thesis Prize. Titled Descendants of Sodom: A History of Pleasure in Lima (1950-1982), Galdo González (University of Amsterdam) wrote a thesis on the history of a group in Peru known as Maricones (fairies).
The jury, chaired by Geertje Mak, chose this thesis because it combines a high theoretical level, wonderful interviews and playful ease of writing.
Image: All judges and nominees. Diego Galdo González is third from left.
The jury about Descendants of Sodom: A History of Pleasure in Lima (1950-1982)
The author took us to the city of Lima, Peru, and took us through oral history into the history of a group known as Maricones. The author chooses as a theoretical and practical starting point the question of how Maricones sought erotic pleasure. Guided by that question, Galdo González leads us through Lima, using stories, celebrations, and events that his respondents fondly recount. This reveals a shift in which Maricone culture moves from street to bar. Moreover, alongside an lhbti identity emerges a rights discourse to which Maricones hardly feel related.
The jurors all read the thesis with breathless admiration, because of the depth of the whole story, the courage to put real lust on paper for once, the broad reading and the ability to make it their own, and last but not least, the history and world of Maricones that the author has brought to life.
Currently, it is not yet possible to post the full thesis on the website. As soon as it can be, the thesis will be displayed here.
Abstract
Descendants of Sodom explores Maricones’ (fairies) pursuit of pleasure in Lima, Peru between the early 1950’s and 1982. Numerous people crossed paths with Maricones in their strolls along the city—including their masculine partners and cis women—but this thesis focuses primarily on the character of the Maricón. Drawing on twenty-three life history interviews with thirteen Maricones and dozens of untapped archival sources, this thesis traces their trajectories across three decades. Descendants of Sodom follows the thread of pleasure to explore the ways in which they mariconizaron (mariconized) public space, crafted a semi-public ambiente, and trapped it within the walls of marica-only commercial venues in the span of a generation.
The other nominees
A four-member expert jury – consisting of Mariecke van den Berg, Alex Bakker, Jonas Roelens and Geertje Mak (chair) – evaluated 17 submissions this edition for quality and originality. They read thorough, innovative, very comprehensive, refreshing and in-depth academic studies. The diversity of topics was also great.
In the end, the jury decided to nominate four theses for the prize. These were the remaining three:
Grensverleggende zorg: Ervaringen van Vlaamse transgender personen met medische zorg, 1950 tot heden. – Esther Lamberts (KU Leuven)
The Impact of LG(BT) Activists with Religious Affinity on LG(BT) Emancipation and Religion in the Netherlands (1978-2001).– Leonie Paauwe (Utrecht University)
Leonie Pauwe didn’t want to publish the thesis online.
Van crimen nefandum naar homosexualiteit: het publieke debat over homoseksualiteit in Nederland tussen 1911 en 1940. – Aimée Tio (Leiden University)
Jury 2024
Alex Bakker (1968) works as a freelance historian and writer, specializing in transgender history. In 2018 his overview work Transgender in the Netherlands. An extraordinary history was published. He wrote the book My false past (2014) about his personal background as a transgender man. Bakker recently published, among other things, about the international connections in transgender issues from 1900-1960 and about the medical history of the VU gender team. In 2021 he started a transgender heritage project and curated the accompanying traveling exhibition.
Mariecke van den Berg is professor by special appointment of Feminism and Christianity at Radboud University in Nijmegen (Catharina Halkes chair) and associate professor of religion and gender at VU University Amsterdam. Her research focuses on public debates on religion, gender and sexuality, for example on the opening of marriage to same-sex couples (‘gay marriage‘) and on religious conversion, such as that of football player Franck Ribéry. In addition, she is engaged in reinterpreting the Christian tradition by developing feminist and queer theology. She is a member of the editorial board of the international peer-reviewed journal Religion & Gender.
Geertje Mak is professor of the Political History of Gender at the University of Amsterdam and researcher at the KNAW’s NL-Lab. Since 1988 she has been publishing on cross-border sexes in relation to the idea of gender as identity. Important publications include Male Women. On gender boundaries in the nineteenth century (1997) and Doubting Sex. Inscriptions, Bodies and Selves in Nineteenth Century Hermaphrodite Case Histories (2012). She recently published’The Sex of the Self and Its Ambiguities, 1899–1964’ in The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences. She also focuses on colonial history and race in the history of science.
Jonas Roelens is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, where he teaches gender history. In 2018 he defended his dissertation on the repression and perception of sodomy in the early modern Southern Netherlands. For this, in 2019 he was awarded both the public and jury prizes of the Flemish PhD Cup and the Erik Duverger Prize. He has published extensively in international academic journals and regularly engages in science communication about his research. He is co-author of the book Silent Desire. A history of homosexuality in Belgium (2017).
Regulations
Read the Thesis and jury regulations