All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
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Women’s Same-Sex Fornication Trials in the 1950s Finland
| The criminal law in Finland has not known “lesbians” until present day. The term has not been used in laws or in the pre-works of the criminal law, not
even in the 1999 criminal law reform, which, however, applies concepts of same-sex relationship and homosexual - but not lesbian. However, women’s mutual sexuality was criminalised as early as 1894. I will discuss the
practical effects of this law in the context of series of culturally significant trials of the Herb Grove orphanage in the 1951-1954.
The social and cultural category of lesbian was borne in Finland maybe only so late as in the 1970s, but at the time of these trials no such identity or legal category existed. I will discuss the concepts that were used in
the police interrogations, in the courtroom hearings, in the media and by the accused women themselves for suspected same-sex activities.
The scene took place in a rural setting in a remote village in borderlands of Finland. It seems that in the 1950s, religious communities in the rural
Finland provided social, cultural and mental networks for lower-class women with same-sex interests. The trials worked as a language laboratorium where
religious conceptualisations and shifts in psychiatric, criminological,
medical and juridical discourses of the time met. The convicted women were moving as if in a liminal space: they were not “homosexuals” since they
were not men but they weren’t lesbians either since there did not exist lesbians in social or cultural sense. By police officers they were
acknowledged full sexual subjectivity as women, but by their defence councels they were deprived it again as members of the passive and overtly-
emotional female gender. According to the judges they were not pathological since they were convicted for indecent acts, which demanded a capacity for
rational and moral judgement from a perpetrator. The women themselves, however, refused to be sexual criminals, since they looked on their actions
from the point of view of their own religious logic.
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