Sexuality in communist Czechoslovakia was to a large extent informed by an expert discourse of sexology. Analyzing sexual advice books published by sexologists for the general public in the 1950s and 1970s, I show that sexual discourses were formed in a reversed order of liberalization vs. conservatism as compared to the West. While writing on sex in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s stressed gender equality and emancipation of women, the texts published in the 1970s insisted on the necessity of gender hierarchy for a successful marriage and defended privatized families isolated from larger society. I link these shifts to the changing character of the regime which moved from accentuating public, work and equality in the 1950s to emphasizing private, family and authority in the 1970s. For my analysis, I use the concepts of psy-ences (Rose, 1992, 1996) and intimacy at the intersection of the public/private divide (Berlant and Warner, 1998), while also accounting for their blind spots. Where Rose insists that psy-ences have operated exclusively in modern liberal capitalist societies, I argue that a psy-ence of sexology also co-constituted social life under state socialism. My paper analyzes Czechoslovak sexual and gender trajectories and accounts for differences from and convergences with 20th century Western histories of sexuality. I critically examine Czechoslovak sexological discourses in their changing historical settings to show that there was not one ‘communist period’, even in one country. Rather there existed varying modes of framing sexuality at different times.

This comparative social-historical study examines different versions of state-socialist body politics manifested in Hungary and Slovenia mainly during the 1950s by using archive material of “unnatural fornication” court cases. By analyzing the available Hungarian “természet elleni fajtalanság” and Slovenian “nenaravno občevanje” court cases, we can shed light on how the defendants were treated by the police and the judiciary. On the basis of these archive data that have never been examined before from these angles, we can construct an at least partial picture of the practices and consequences of state surveillance of same-sex-attracted men during state-socialism. The article explores the functioning of state-socialist social control mechanisms directed at nonnormative sexualities that had long-lasting consequences on the social representation of homosexuality in both countries.

Despite its historical focus on aberrant behavior, sexology barely dealt with sexual deviants in 1950s Czechoslovakia. Rather, sexologists only treated isolated instances of deviance. The rare cases that went to court appeared mostly because they hindered work or harmed the national economy. Two decades later, however, the situation was markedly different. Hundreds of men were labeled as sexual delinquents and sentenced for treatment in special sexological wards at psychiatric hospitals. They endangered society, so it was claimed, by being unwilling or unable to conform to the family norm. The mode of subjection shifted from work to family. I analyze this change by using the tools of Gil Eyal’s sociology of expertise (2013), which focuses on shifts in institutional matrices that bring forth new groups of agents creating new expert networks. I argue that sexology became profoundly institutionalized in the early 1970s, which brought the discipline closer to psychiatry and forensic science. New inpatient facilities were opened that could admit sentenced sexual deviants. Also, demographic changes accelerated in the 1960s, especially skyrocketing divorce rates and plummeting birth rates, which made it imperative for the government to focus on cementing the family. After the failed attempts of Prague Spring in 1968, the new pro-Soviet government of communist Czechoslovakia did just that. During the time dubbed as “normalization” by the new elites, anyone who strayed from the family norm was suspected of deviance.

2018 by Cambridge University Press

During the past decade, the states situated on the territory of the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe have made newspaper headlines around the world for topics on gender and sexuality: it seems that each step towards gender equality and inclusive sexual citizenship in the region has been accompanied by counter-actions on different scales. In what way is the present day of appropriate legislation and recent backlash connected to the legacies of regulations of gender relationships, intimacies, and sexualities under state socialism? What role do economic, political, and educational changes that took place in the region in the 1990s play in these developments? And finally, can we speak about certain similarities between discourses on sexuality and intimacy in the “West,” on the one hand, and in post-Soviet and East European countries, on the other? Reflecting on current changes in post-socialist societies, the authors of this special issue give their own answers to these questions.

Accepted version of Hana Havelková and Libora Oates-Indruchová. 2014 “Expropriated Voice: Transformations of Gender Culture under State Socialism; Czech Society, 1948–1989.” In The Politics of Gender Culture under State Socialism: An Expropriated Voice, ed. by Havelková, Hana and Libora Oates-Indruchová. London and New York: Routledge. Pp. 3–27.

The essay touches upon one general and three specific topics. First Bollobás reviews what totalitarianism looked like in everyday life during the decades of communism. Moving on from this general assessment, her second topic addresses the particular issue of intellectual isolation which Central and Eastern Europe suffered. Then the author discusses the discrepancies between how communist rule was actually experiences and how the West often perceived it. Finally, Bollobás explores the topic of how women were affected by the cumulative legacies of pre-World War II patriarchy and post-World War II communism.