2016
Sex under Socialism. From Emancipation of Women to Normalized Families in Czechoslovakia.
LIŠKOVÁ, KateřinaBasic information
Original name
Sex under Socialism. From Emancipation of Women to Normalized Families in Czechoslovakia.
Authors
Edition
Sexualities, SAGE, 2016, 1363-4607
Other information
Language
English
Type of outcome
Article in a journal
Field of Study
50000 5. Social Sciences
Country of publisher
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Confidentiality degree
is not subject to a state or trade secret
Impact factor
Impact factor: 0.922
Marked to be transferred to RIV
Yes
RIV identification code
RIV/00216224:14230/16:00090530
Organization unit
Faculty of Social Studies
UT WoS
EID Scopus
Keywords in English
Czechoslovakia; Eastern Europe; sexology; sexual advice books; sexuality and gender; socialism
Tags
International impact, Reviewed
Changed: 27/4/2017 10:04, Ing. Alena Raisová
Abstract
In the original language
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 emancipa- tion 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. In 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 article 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.