Seminar Femke Valkhoff and Tijmen van Voorthuizen: Writing women and drinking queers

In this Cultural History seminar, Femke Valkhoff and Tijmen van Voorthuizen, both second year PhD candidates at the Cultural History department, will present their most recent research. Learn in this seminar more about the intellectual development of early modern Dutch women and the history of queer bars.

How do cities make women?

Femke Valkhoff will present research from her project How do Cities Make Women? Empowerment, Self-Development, and Learned Identities in the Early Modern Dutch City. To develop themselves intellectually, whether through practical or scholarly studies, women were often confined to the domestic sphere. 

Valkhoff focuses specifically on how early modern Dutch women made use of spaces like literary networks and religious communities to transmit knowledge and intellectually develop themselves.

Queer bars in the Low Countries

Tijmen van Voorthuizen will present research from his project The History and Heritage of Queer Bars in the Low Countries, 1900-present. The central theme of this presentation will be the ‘mundane’ history of queer bars. Bars are given an exceptional place in queer historiography, seen often as highly political spaces. 

Moving beyond this ‘Stonewall-esque’ view of bars as spaces for identity formation and political organisation, the focus in this presentation will be on bars as primarily emotional spaces in (queer) people’s day-to-day lives. 

Van Voorthuizen argues that the cultural meaning given to bars by their patrons, both in past and present, is a result of people’s emotional practices and the interaction with the material environment within and outside of bars.