The international congress “Thinking about Queer: Masculinities and Sexual Dissidence”The lecture series was inaugurated today, Thursday, January 29th, in the Elías Serra Ràfols Room of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of La Laguna. It is directed by a professor from the Department of Art History and Philosophy. Antonio Marrero, who explained that this meeting proposes the approach queer “Not as a closed label or an ideological position, but as an analytical tool” for examining different disciplines. “The purpose is not to provoke, but to engage in rigorous and intellectually committed scholarship in a space for dialogue that is as demanding as it is inclusive”: In short, the congress advocates for a transdisciplinary dialogue that addresses masculinities, artistic representation, and the multiple expressions of sexual dissidence.
The rector of the academic institution, Francisco García, inaugurated the congress by recalling that the public university understands “research as a space for critical reflection and dialogue that must take place from the perspective of diversity to be truly useful to society.” This drive is something that also challenges institutions, and in that sense, he acknowledged that the university has changed thanks to internal impetus. “It hasn't always been a space that has embraced diversity, so the openness we are experiencing has been possible thanks to those internal struggles.” This, applied to academic knowledge, fosters “a coexistence of knowledge and an openness to new lines of research that enrich the results.”.
The congress is organized by the research group Art, Fashion and Identity (a+m+d) and its director, Professor Carlos Castro Brunetto, He explained during the opening that the idea of organizing this first edition of the congress is the product of constant conversations within this group, in which the students had long expressed their interest in, as the title of this meeting indicates, “thinking about quee"r" in the society of 2026. "This is how conferences are born: with ideas that come from debate and with teams that row in the same direction. The university must be and is a meeting point to transmit not what we already know, but what we are going to know in the future, and in this the role of research groups is very important.".
The Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Javier Medina, He also referred to the fact that this congress addresses “a specific and novel topic” under the rigor expected of “academia.” He likewise praised the image used as the congress poster, which reminded him of the concept of “face” proposed by sociologist Erving Goffman—that is, the multiple public faces that each person constructs for their social interaction, “a sociological iconography that underlies this meeting.”.
Francisco Vázquez.
The smell of sexual dissidence
The opening lecture was given by Francisco Vázquez García, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cádiz, entitled “The Scent of Sexual Dissidence: Genealogy of a Stigma.” In it, he addressed a line of research that has been studied for decades in the social sciences: how one of the signs used to denigrate groups is olfactory stigmatization. “They are associated with a distinctive, usually repulsive, smell. The cases of 'Moors,' Black people, women, witches, prostitutes, the Irish, communists… have all been studied. Very diverse groups. In my case, I am interested in gender, sex, and sexuality dissidents, especially homoerotic individuals, who have received very little research.‘.
Although it may seem like a thing of the past, the speaker pointed out that it is very much a current issue and gave two recent texts as examples: on the one hand, the arguments that the Vox political party used on the occasion of Pride Day 2019 in Madrid, in which it criticized the celebration "for the bad smell that this demonstration always gives off and the lack of civility and the unsanitary conditions in the streets"; and, on the other hand, a writing by a Cypriot bishop who claims that homosexual people "emit a bad smell, but if they convert and abandon homosexuality, they begin to have a fragrance.".
The speaker reviewed various historical periods in which political and religious authorities stigmatized the homosexual community for their supposed odor, basing this judgment on alleged spiritual or pseudo-scientific causes. "Currently, these categorizations that consider bad odor an attribute of a discriminated group are seen as anachronistic, because we attribute odor to the individual; it is an individual responsibility.".
However, this does not eliminate such discrimination: “In societies of liberal individualism, winners take care of their image and hygiene, while losers who neglect their bodies emit a bad odor. So, these collective olfactory categorizations that have seemingly disappeared continue to operate, only now they no longer distinguish between homosexuals and heterosexuals, but rather, within homosexuals, they differentiate the gay man who doesn't smell—the integrated one, who leads a stable, even marital, sex life and has purchasing power—from “the queer one”—who leads a promiscuous life, in precarious conditions, is homeless, and is also an activist. That's the one they label as smelly, which is somewhat what appears in the Vox text.”.
This historical overview touched on several periods: from the Middle Ages to the 18th century, this discrimination had a theological basis, as a connection was established between sodomy and the plague, an epidemic considered a punishment from God. In later periods, this link between epidemics and odor disappeared, and by the 18th century, sodomy was a private matter not punished by law, but socially condemned. And once again, olfactory prejudices reappeared: forensic experts believed that sodomites and pederasts displayed "a kind of duplicity, because they had a very perfumed appearance while inside they were unclean people" with sphincter problems due to their sexuality, which supposedly produced an odor that had to be masked with perfumes.
The prejudice mutated again when sexology emerged in the 19th century, establishing the belief that homosexuals “have an erogenous fixation on smell” or, as Freud put it, were in “the sadistic-anal phase.” Vázquez García detailed how 19th-century experts “described the attraction felt by homosexuals from the aristocracy—a class considered decadent and libertine—to the bodily fluids of the proletariat, a taste for the smell of soldiers, sailors, or manual laborers, something that even appears in the works of Proust.”.
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