About the Book
This handbook provides an overview of scholarly research on sexuality in East Central Europe for both students and academics, focusing on the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, from the late nineteenth century to the present.
The collection is organized into eight sections covering major areas of research including non-normative sexualities; family, marriage, and kinship; race/ethnicity and nationalism; birth, health, and reproduction; religion; sex, work, and mobility; violence; and sex education. The chapters highlight the breadth and depth of current scholarship on the region, past and present. The contributions present cutting-edge research treating each of the East Central European countries on its own terms and contextualizing sexual meanings, practices, and dynamics in relation to the specific ways they have been shaped, experienced, represented, and contested in the lives of people across these territories. In doing so, the book underscores the differences in the region’s trajectories of sexuality and sexual politics from those of not only the West but also Russia/USSR and (former) Yugoslavia across the long twentieth century.
Written by a multidisciplinary team of international experts, The Routledge Handbook of Sexuality in East Central Europe is an ideal resource for scholars of European history, gender studies, anthropology, and sociology.
Chapter 21 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA) 4.0 license.
Table of Contents:
Introduction Section 1: Non-normative sexualities Section introduction 1. Homosexuality in interwar Poland 2. Lesbian lives under Hungarian state-socialism, in the mirror of psychiatry 3. Homosexuality and activism in state-socialist and postsocialist Poland 4. Silence, invisibility, and emancipation. Articulating LGB identities in socialist Czechoslovakia 5. A cross-border lesbian romance? The reception of Károly Makk’s Another Way in Poland and Hungary 6. A brief history of Hungarian queer politics in the 20th and 21st centuries Section 2: Sexuality, family, marriage, and kinship Section introduction 7. Marriages and nations before World War II 8. Socialist marriage and sexual satisfaction in Czechoslovakia and Hungary 9. Divorce during socialism in Czechoslovakia and women’s equality 10. Egalitarian myth and its implementation by families of choice in Poland 11. The father is a man, the mother is a woman? Notions of family within the Hungarian LGBTQ community Section 3: Sexuality, race/ethnicity & nationalism Section introduction 12. Eugenics and ethnic nationalism in interwar Hungary 13. Some babies are better than others. Selective pronatalism, ethnicity and sexuality politics behind the Iron Curtain 14. The role of sex education in Russian propaganda: The Czech Republic 15. Race on trial: Understanding sexualized racism in socialist and postsocialist Poland 16. Looking for heterosexuality in the imaginary East: The role of sexualities for the illiberal Hungarian project Section 4: Birth control, reproduction, health Section introduction 17. Transnational aspects of family planning: Interwar and state-socialist Poland 18. Limitations, innovations, and imitations: Chemical contraceptives in communist Poland 19. Childbirth and parent education in the state-socialist Czechoslovakia 20. “I don’t go into this issue with my patients.” Motherhood and sexuality of women with Turner Syndrome in Poland 21. Risk, responsibility and pleasure: HIV politics in Poland Section 5: Religion Section introduction 22. Masturbating in Yiddish: Jewish bodies and voices from Eastern Europe 23. Conflict or a united front? Sexuality between Church and State in postwar Poland 24. The World Congress of Families 25. The debate on homosexuality in Poland during the 2000s and the lord-boor game Section 6: Sex work and mobility Section introduction 26. Wayward daughters and runaway servants: The lost girls of Central Europe and the construction of the trafficking trope 27. Sex and military: Soldiers, prostitution, venereal diseases in the Great War in Hungary 28. Italian men, Western goods and transactional sex during the long 1960s in Hungary 29. A profitable enterprise? Sex work, economic emancipation, and transnational mobility in 1970s and 1980s Poland 30. Cruising communist Poland in contemporary Polish art practices 31. Between East and West and digital elsewhere: Polish queer migrants making sense of Brexit Section 7: Sexualized violence Section introduction 32. Sexuality, imprisonment, and violence in counterrevolutionary Hungary, 1919–1922 33. Operation Hyacinth and the history of state violence in the People’s Republic of Poland 34. “Fair game for stigmatization due to his predilections”: Homophobia and sexism in the criminological discourse of rape 35. Do we care? Intergenerational discussion about the first campaign against gender-based violence in Slovakia 36. Blind justice: Hungarian policies on violence against women and girls Section 8: Sex education Section introduction 37. Sexuality and gender in school-based sex education in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland in the 1970s and 1980s 38. “The right to citizenship”: Sexology, homosexuality and the discourse of rights in socialist Poland in the 1970s 39. Self-education as activism: The case of trans persons in Poland 40. Who is responsible for sex education? The divisions of family and school, private and public after 1989 in Slovakia 41. Sexual minorities in post-socialist sex education in Hungary – 20 years of an LGBT+ school programme
About the Author :
Agnieszka Kościańska is Professor in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw, Poland. Her recent books include To See a Moose: The History of Polish Sex Education (2021) and Gender, Pleasure, and Violence: The Construction of Expert Knowledge of Sexuality in Poland (2021).
Anita Kurimay is an Associate Professor of History and Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bryn Mawr College, USA. She is the author of Queer Budapest, 1873–1961 (2020) and has published articles on the histories of sexual politics and sexual science in Hungary.
Kateřina Lišková is Associate Professor and Senior Researcher at the Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciences. She authored Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945–1989 (2018) and writes about the history of sexuality, gender, and health with expertise in comparative and transnational perspectives.
Hadley Z. Renkin is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna. His research focuses on East European sexual geotemporalities and Hungarian sexual politics. He has published on postsocialist sexual politics, East European sexual science, and the (dis)connections between anthropological and queer theories.
