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

LIŠKOVÁ, Kateřina. ‘Now you see them, now you don’t’. Sexual deviants and sexological expertise in communist Czechoslovakia. Online. History of the Human Sciences. SAGE, 2016, roč. 29, č. 1, s. 49-74. ISSN 0952-6951. Dostupné z: https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0952695115617383. [citováno 2024-04-24]

Základní údaje

• Originální název: ‘Now you see them, now you don’t’. Sexual deviants and sexological expertise in communist Czechoslovakia
• Autoři: LIŠKOVÁ, Kateřina (203 Česká republika, garant, domácí)
• Vydání: History of the Human Sciences, SAGE, 2016, 0952-6951.

Další údaje

• Originální jazyk: angličtina
• Typ výsledku: Článek v odborném periodiku
• Obor: 50000 5. Social Sciences
• Stát vydavatele: Velká Británie a Severní Irsko
• Utajení: není předmětem státního či obchodního tajemství
• WWW: URL
• Impakt faktor: Impact factor: 0.397
• Kód RIV: RIV/00216224:14230/16:00089527
• Organizační jednotka: Fakulta sociálních studií
• Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0952695115617383
• UT WoS: 000371563100003
• Klíčová slova anglicky: communism; expertise; family; sexual deviance; sexuality
• Příznaky: Mezinárodní význam, Recenzováno

Anotace

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.

Anotace česky

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.