JY 00:12
Hi, friends, welcome to the latest episode of Lecture Theatre. With us today we have Wannes Dupont, an assistant professor of history at Yale-NUS College. Wannes comes from Belgium, and he recently moved to Singapore. Wannes's work focuses on the history of sexuality and biopolitics, primarily, but not exclusively in Europe. His dissertation and current book project is a comparative history of homosexuality. But his research interests span as wide as the Catholic Church to the United Nations and Interpol. So I'm excited to dive into all of that with Wannes. Thank you for being with us.
Wannes 00:56
Thank you for having me.
JY 00:58
So Wannes, tell us a bit more about your life story. How did you become an academic?
Wannes 01:04
Well, there's no clear trajectory there. In a way, I just stumbled into it. Which is to say that I was never for a while, at least I wasn't quite sure, if I had chosen the right major. And then towards the third year, I got interested in a research project. And that sort of really captivated me. It was a very different topic than the one I'm working on now. But by the end of that, there was some sort of indication that I might consider applying for a PhD and I thought, why not try it? I'd never thought about before, but it seemed like too good an opportunity to waste. And it all went from there. This was in Belgium. I studied at the University of Antwerp.
JY 01:58
For those of us who are less familiar with higher education in continental Europe, can you tell us more about what that's like, both structurally, but also in terms of the culture of academia. And how has that been different from or similar to life here in Singapore?
Wannes 02:17
Well, it's both a very good, and a very broad question, and therefore quite a complicated one to answer. Because obviously, Europe is a sort of amalgamation of different systems. And in 1999, you have these Bologna Agreements, where Europe basically creates a sort of educational space and educational common market. And all kinds of reforms have taken place around all the countries that were part of this, that changed names of degrees into Bachelor's and Master's. Before that, these things didn't exist.
When I was studying, for example, I was a candidate after two years, and a license after four years. So everything had to change. And one of the effects is that nowadays, we have a nomenclature that is similar across Europe, but you still have the remnants of very different systems underneath. And so each country has their own story. And we live sort of with the fiction that it's all the same, but still countries differ widely from each other. So I could tell you more about the Belgian situation specifically. I did my Bachelor's and Master's at the same institution. And it's a relatively different situation than it would be in the US, for example, where you do an undergraduate for four years, and then you do a Master's if you're going to be going to continue into a PhD. But traditionally, in Belgium, we do the four year education, and that would constitute a Master's. It's very, very different in terms of the trajectory itself. And then very few people actually go on to take a PhD. But the problem is that for things like philosophy, history, and so on, a Bachelor degree doesn't buy anything on the job market. So everybody goes on to do the Master's. And I think that's very different from the way that things work in the United States, for example.
JY 04:33
And how do you think coming from that system and that background has shaped the way you do your research, but also the way you have navigated the education landscape here in Singapore?
Wannes 04:45
One big difference, or at least one that is obvious, is that you choose what you do from the start. So it's not like here at Yale-NUS where you have a sort of core curriculum, or a common curriculum that explores a vast array, or a wide array, at least, of different subjects. And then you choose a major at the end of your second year, and then you pursue them the last two years of undergraduate. So what you have to do in Belgium to this very day is choose from the start, which is to say I study history. And that means you study history from the first day, which also means that the training is much more specific as a historian from the start, meaning that, for example, you do archival research from the first semester onwards. And actually the the education is very much centered on sort of mastering the historian's craft. I think there are some benefits to that. There are certainly also some drawbacks, as well. But I think that very strong focus from the start is a big difference from the system here. ,
JY 05:55
In Singapore, traditionally, that's been the case. The single track, British specialization system. But the United States issues has had such a huge impact on higher education in Singapore that we have slowly moved toward the more broad-based model.
Wannes 06:14
So this has changed more generally? There is more move towards the American system in recent years more generally? It's not just Yale-NUS?
JY 06:23
Yes. Within Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at NUS, people don't decide their major into the end of their first year.
Wannes 06:36
And that's how also how it feels—the entire way of speaking about the educational landscape. It has taken the sort of the vocabulary of the American system, which still confuses me, because I was never educated in the American system. And when I did a postdoc there, all that was new to me, and in some respects, it's still new to me.
JY 06:59
And so just to be clear, you did your undergraduate and graduate work primarily in Dutch, but your dissertation was in English. Is that right?
Wannes 07:08
Well, my, my undergraduate work is mostly in French, because it was mostly on late 19th and early 20th century history, in Belgium and France, where the vast majority of sources, until quite recently, would have been in French.
JY 07:31
How do you think language has shaped the way that we do your work and teach?
Wannes 07:36
Boy, it depends. The English comes, in a way, more naturally than the French simply because of media outlets. People in the Low Countries and people in Northwestern Europe are flooded with Anglo-American media. And so I think people just are more used to English. And by the time they're 18, basically, even before they go into higher education, they will have at least a passive knowledge, a working knowledge of English. If you do a PhD, nowadays, it's encouraged to do it in English, simply because it gets much wider wider exposure and allows you to get into international mobility, which is much more difficult if you write in a smaller language like Dutch, which you are allowed to do.
JY 08:37
So most people do it in English.
Wannes 08:41
I couldn't say for sure. The amount of people writing in English is definitely growing
JY 08:47
You probably wouldn't be here if you had written in Dutch.
Wannes 08:49
No, that's very likely the case. And that's an awareness that is fast growing, of course.
JY 08:57
So this might be a good time to just pivot to your own research and your own work. So let's begin with your book project. Tell us more about what it's about and why it's important?
Wannes 09:09
So when I started out, working on it, the idea was generally to do a history of homosexuality in Belgium, which hadn't been done before. Which is to say that most of these queer histories are written on a national basis, sometimes even on a local basis. The map of Europe, so to speak, is largely covered, specifically in Central and Western Europe. There's a lot of work being done on Eastern Europe nowadays, but there're still some blind spots. And Belgium was one of those blind spots on the map. So what I was going to do was sort of a variation on the theme of writing these national cases and just filling in this blank. The thing was, all these histories were based on the assumption that there is a massive explosion of discourse on sexual perversion from the late 19th century onwards in the West or in Europe, which to some extent is true. But it wasn't true for Belgium. And that was the the main finding. And also my main problem when I started out working on this project, because I could not find this. I suppose it just hadn't turned out, there wasn't a single book written on sexual perversion until at least the 1930s. And really until the 1950s. Whereas, you know, in Germany, you'd have these in the 1870s already. And lots of them. So that was a problem. And this become became intriguing to me. And the question soon became: what explains this striking silence on the issue of sexual perversion, in general, and on homosexuality more particularly, in the Belgian situation? And therefore, it became this exercise, looking at the reasons why this discourse was so actively being produced in France, for example, in Germany, in the Netherlands, in the United Kingdom, and then looking at why these reasons weren't there—or what are the reasons that blocked this kind of discourse from emerging—in Belgium?
JY 11:18
So you are the implicitly challenging the scholarly idea of the West as this of homogenous bloc?
Wannes 11:28
Yeah, so it's a basically draws on Chakrabarty's idea of provincialization, which, of course, is developed, in order to sort of work against these generalizing claims about the West and the rest. And interestingly, even though there is a strong awareness of this issue, still very often it gets perpetuated. We do talk about Europe as sort of one place, we do talk about the West as having a kind of coherence. But when you delve into specific historical themes, you see much more dissimilarity. And to the extent that there is similarity, it gets mistaken for homogeneity. And I think breaking up this idea really helps prevent us from sort of continuing to talk about the West, for example, as a common reference point of the theory, as though we all know what the West is like, and is about, historically. And it's interesting coming here that I bumped into this characterization of the West quite often. And trying to push back on it in class, for example, where you do see that happening, and where students if you press them, they will recognize it, obviously, but nevertheless, the shorthand version, both in historiography and common speech, remains sort of this homogenised West. I think historians of sexuality have a part to play in sort of deconstructing that notion.
JY 12:58
So how and why did you become interested in the history of sexuality specifically?
Wannes 13:07
That's a complicated answer in the sense that it wasn't preordained in any way. For my Master's, for example, I was actually trained as a medievalist, not as a modernist. And I did my masters on epidemiology and plague policy in 15th and 16th, predominantly 16th, century. And obviously, you get in touch with the work of Michel Foucault, who wrote on plague policy as one early example of the disciplining of society. And then I took a course, which at the time was, I think, the only course on the history of sexuality, gender and the body in the country in my final year. And I found that so sort of counterintuitive and interesting—many of the insights. It was well taught too, and I had established a good rapport with the professor in question. And, you know, there too, we bumped into Foucault again. And it all went from there. So basically, through that connection, I got interested increasingly in sexuality, and then it became my PhD.
JY 14:20
Interesting. Historical contingency at work. So one of the things that has struck me and that you have alluded to is your commitment to transnational and comparative approaches. So can you say a bit more about why you chose those approaches and what challenges you face moving between different archives and historiographies and languages?
Wannes 14:45
It really depends on the specific research that you're doing. When I was working on this sort of comparative history on the lack of discourse about homosexuality in Belgium, I had to really go look for archival evidence elsewhere, in order to juxtapose these different countries and the different reasons why discourse emerged in one and not the other. And that's a very difficult thing to do, because it's time consuming, and comparative work can be very complicated. But that's one of the things that I really loved about it. And my current research, which is pivoted more towards the postwar period, and focussed, as you mentioned before, on institutions, and particularly sexual policy institutions, like Interpol, the United Nations, the Catholic Church, and so on, and population policy and so forth—it's slightly easier if you can follow the complexity, but also the structure of huge international organizations. I think in many ways, the way forward for the history of sexuality is looking at these international, transnational connections. But we have to do it first, I think, for practical reasons, at the very least, but also because of their historical importance, through these large archives built by large institutions spanning the globe.
JY 16:12
But isn't the worry that that we might also risk neglecting parts of the world that weren't necessarily plugged into these organizations?
Wannes 16:21
Yeah. And that's why it's good that not everybody does the same kind of research. And I also agree that one of the risks of sort of going for the next frontier in the search is that we haven't completed the previous stage, so to speak. So there's a lot of local, regional national history that needs to be done and it is being done. It's not like everybody's doing transnational research. And it is true that if you just look at these organizations, you get a very particular picture. But they're not mutually exclusive, of course. You can do one and then realize that you're looking at the world through the eyes of these particular institutions and the people working in them. But that is not to say that other approaches all of a sudden have become irrelevant. Quite the contrary.
JY 17:13
So this would be a good time to talk a bit more about those institutions. So I know one of the institutions you have written about is the Catholic Church, especially as it relates to historical debates over contraception, but also a more recent involvement in what has been termed anti-gender movement. So can you just give us the two-minute summary of that work?
Wannes 17:38
So, I come from a very Catholic region, or at least historically, a very Catholic region. And I was struck to find that within the church, the most progressive voices came from these very Catholic countries and regions, including the one that was raised. And so that kind of sparked my interest. And I followed my way up the hierarchy, the national hierarchies to the Vatican, and and particularly also to Geneva, where the Vatican was represented at the international institutions. And then you notice that it becomes a very important player in developing postwar policy, particularly with regard to sexuality, contraception, population policy, and so on. So that is one way through which I ended up doing this sort of research. Then through another connection—a friend of mine who teaches sociology at the Free University of Brussels—he and others were doing a bigger project on this anti-gender movement, which of course has grown in force in Europe and beyond, in the past 10 years. Or slightly more, actually 20 years now perhaps.
JY 18:52
So say more about that movement.
Wannes 18:55
It's increasingly coordinated through international initiatives. But what they basically do is sort of formulate a counter-discourse to what they see as the sort of the Gender International, or what they call gender ideology, which means anything that is sort of sexually liberal, which they try to move against. And this is a large body of different organizations—there is the Catholic Church, there is a lot of the evangelical movements, but also nationalist by right movements. The Russian government is very interested in in this type of discourse. And of course, it changes very much with different counter-narratives to sort of what people perceive to be the liberal order of things. And therefore it feeds on it in very complex and diverse ways, but it's certainly seeking more coherence nowadays, and people are tracking that. And there's been a book on anti-gender campaigns in Europe. A few international colleagues came together in order to bring together the specificity of particular national contexts in this regard. And this kind of research is ongoing.
JY 20:30
And you wrote a chapter?
Wannes 20:32
I cowrote a chapter about Belgium, yes.
JY 20:38
So that's the Catholic Church piece of things. Let's turn to the United Nations and Interpol, you have an article for coming about that. Do you want to say a bit more?
Wannes 20:49
Well, so the article that I wrote on it is sort of the first one in a series and eventually a book on the internationalization or the globalization of sexuality as a policy issue in the postwar era, particularly 1940s, 50s and early 1960s. When you have a lot of these international organizations that in various ways, become interested in the issues of sexuality, and they really change the landscape. The article that I've just written is mostly concerned with the way that Interpol engages with juvenile delinquency mixed with seduction theory, the perceived threat of homosexuality, and how it actually— while being alarmist at first in the early 1950s—eventually spreads a more international discourse about the need for decriminalization, which chimed with the Wolfenden Report, which was also supported by a lot of the international penal policy organizations, and eventually found a way by 1958 to the United Nations, which also recommended decriminalization much earlier than what is usually assumed. And of course, it didn't have the immediate effect of actual decriminalization in many countries, though it did in some. But it nevertheless created this international consensus on this issue at a high level, that certainly provided the basis for the penal revolution that later on would be connected with the sexual revolution.
JY 22:19
But of course, that continues till today—debates over decriminalization of homosexuality. Recent events in Brunei and other parts of the world—the debate continues. So how does the fact that sexuality remains such a contested domain of culture and politics influence your work? Has it at all?
Wannes 22:46
Predominantly in the way that it turned me towards the global perspective, to see effectively things happening around the world, and then if you study historically, you very often noticed that they are connected. And of course, they are connected today. And this interconnection is very hard to study, because you have to look at things from such a bird's eye view. And yet that makes it challenging and interesting. At the same time, I can't pretend to be an expert on sort of the global events nowadays. But having moved to Singapore and Southeast Asia, you do get a better grasp of what are the themes that are at play here. And of course, what is very obvious is how intense the discussion on sexual issues is, in this part of the world, in much the same way as it is elsewhere. But of course, you usually look at things from the more familiar perspective that you have. And this is incredibly enriching. And I hope it will continue to be in time to come.
JY 23:57
Well, so one of the things in gender and sexuality studies is that there is a lot of emphasis in theoretical work. But one of the things I've noticed is that your approach has been empirical. So what do you think is the right place of theory in the field? And how do you navigate that?
Wannes 24:16
That's a very tricky question. So I think it's, it's a very fair point to make. And we can actually be intellectually honest about the fact that historians and theorists have not always had a smooth relationship. There were a bunch of good articles that were written in the 1990s, with the emergence of queer theory— some of which sort of claimed to be post-empirical and so on. And there was a lot of pushback from people who had been doing very empirical work on sexuality, very often those were historians. And so there was a bit of friction at the time. I don't think it's been quite resolved. And I think the the heat of the argument at the time has sort of, you know, quietened down a bit still. But while I am committed personally to empirical work, this is not to imply that I somehow resist theory. But I mostly use it in support of the empirical work that I do rather than the other way around. And that, again, is not sort of a declaration on the way that it ought to be. But it certainly is the way it is in my work. As I said, I was very much trained as a historian. And I cannot deny that archival work is the thing that I like most. So it's the last thing I'd like to give up.
JY 25:44
What does it mean for you to be a historian of modern Europe, but to be working in Singapore? So far away from archives, far away from other scholars working?
Wannes 26:03
It can be a challenge, sometimes simply because you havedon't always have the kind of access to sources or particular kinds of publications that you would. That said, I feel very privileged having the opportunity to go back to Europe, more or less regularl,y in order to do research. And it is, of course, as I already mentioned, very enriching to be another part of the world and stay out of assumptions that grow on you if you've spent too much time in one part of the world. And as I said, it's when you start to pivot your work towards other parts of the world as well. So one of the courses I'm teaching next year is— initially I thought it was going to be the history of sexuality in modern Europe— but it will now be history of sexuality in Europe and its empire. So it really broadens your scope. And certainly the teaching—the contact with students who are from all over, but very often, also from Singapore—really helps to sort of challenge you in the way that you have developed a tendency to tell the story. And they make you you see differently and tell it differently. So that's very enrching in and of itself.
JY 27:27
What has it been like teaching and working in Singapore and at Yale-NUS?
Wannes 27:33
So far it's been very nice indeed. So I've only been here one semester. I mean, the semester is only now winding down. But in between the moving process and getting used to the place—we are sort of that through that right now. But yeah, I find it very easy to like both this institution and the country as a place to live and work. And it always comes with some complexity, because you're unfamiliar with certain things. But I think most foreigners will agree that Singapore lends itself easily to getting getting settled. It's a question that a lot of people ask, and I can only answer in general terms, which is to say that it's been good so far.
JY 28:30
What drew you here?
Wannes 28:33
As always, the confluence of events. But when I saw the job ad, this was a particularly appealing idea. I was always committed to going abroad. And I spent a year in the United States. But then, you know, all of a sudden, there's this possibility of Singapore. I never thought about it. But the idea itself sort was appealing in and of itself. And so yeah, why why not give it a go? I certainly didn't come here because I had a long term plan of ending up in Singapore. I would be lying if I suggested as much. But, as I said, I was just open to moving around.
JY 29:27
Historical contingency. Transnationalism! Well, so one last question that we ask of all guests on the podcast. What do you think you'd be working on in 10 years time?
Wannes 29:40
Oh, god. I mean, considering the amount of contingency in my life so far, that's a difficult question. I do hope that I'll be working on international issues. I like doing that so much that I hope will continue continue doing that for a while, because there's so much left to do. And literally everything you do in that regard seems to be a challenge because it needs doing still. But it'salso fun as a challenge because it connects a lot of dots that haven't been connected yet. So why not more about Asia, or generally sort of more international institutions? At least that's what I'm doing now. 10 years is a long time.
JY 30:29
It is. Thank you so much for being on this podcast, Wannes, and I look forward to all that is to come.
Wannes 30:39
My pleasure.
