Ambre Macaire | April 22nd, 2026
On April 22nd, 2026, the UC Berkeley Institute of European Studies welcomed Professor Mehmet Sinan Birdal from Freie Universitat Berlin to campus to deliver a talk entitled “Political Ontology of the Closet: Elite Minorities and Sectarian Majorities in the Wilhelmine Empire”, attended by approximately ten participants. His presentation explored the political ontology of minority articulation through an analysis of divisions within nineteenth-century homosexual movements in the Wilhelmine Empire.
Professor Birdal’s central argument drew from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s framework, which identifies an epistemological impasse between universalizing and minoritizing discourses of sexuality. However, rather than approaching the issue as an epistemological debate, he reframed it as an ontological paradox. According to Birdal, Sedgwick attempts to detach the matrix from politics. This separation is problematic, however, because homosexual activism in the nineteenth century was deeply intertwined with broader political and ideological conflicts.
To illustrate this point, Birdal referenced Magnus Hirschfeld, the founder of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which is widely regarded as the first gay rights organization. Hirschfeld, who was trained as a scientist and physician, advocated fiercely for the reform of Paragraph 175, the German law criminalizing homosexuality, by presenting homosexuality as a biological “third sex”. On the contrary, activist Benedict Friedlaender adopted a markedly different position, eventually breaking away from the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. For Friedlaender, national unity was grounded in virility and masculine bonds, rather than the family structure. He argued that male friendship constituted the foundation of the nation and developed an anti-bureaucratic worldview in which social progress emerged from groups of highly virile men. Within this framework, he portrayed women and priests as exercising hegemonic control over society.
Through this comparison, Professor Birdal demonstrated the limits of reducing debates on sexuality to the opposition between universalizing and minoritizing perspectives. Such a framework, he argued, overlooks the central roles played by race, class, and gender, while depoliticizing the historical conflicts at stake. In his concluding remarks, he also emphasized the potentially pernicious effects of majoritarian politics. The construction of a majority, he suggested, depends upon the active production of minorities, a process that inevitably generates fragmentation and exclusion.