J 2016

‘Now you see them, now you don’t’. Sexual deviants and sexological expertise in communist Czechoslovakia

LIŠKOVÁ, Kateřina

Basic information

Original name

‘Now you see them, now you don’t’. Sexual deviants and sexological expertise in communist Czechoslovakia

Authors

LIŠKOVÁ, Kateřina (203 Czech Republic, guarantor, belonging to the institution)

Edition

History of the Human Sciences, SAGE, 2016, 0952-6951

Other information

Language

English

Type of outcome

Článek v odborném periodiku

Field of Study

50000 5. Social Sciences

Country of publisher

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Confidentiality degree

není předmětem státního či obchodního tajemství

References:

Impact factor

Impact factor: 0.397

RIV identification code

RIV/00216224:14230/16:00089527

Organization unit

Faculty of Social Studies

DOI

UT WoS

000371563100003

Keywords in English

communism; expertise; family; sexual deviance; sexuality

Tags

International impact, Reviewed
Změněno: 26/4/2017 15:23, Ing. Alena Raisová

Abstract

ORIG CZ

V originále

Despite its historical focus on aberrant behavior, sexology barely dealt with sexual deviants in 1950s Czechoslovakia. Rather, sexologists treated only 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 analyse 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 the 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.

In Czech

Text analyzuje souvislosti mezi výskytem mužské sexuální deviace, jejím pojetím v sexuologickém diskurzu a proměnami režimu v socialistickém Československu mezi 50. a 70. lety 20. století.