Sex under Socialism. From Emancipation of Women to Normalized Families in Czechoslovakia.

LIŠKOVÁ, Kateřina. Sex under Socialism. From Emancipation of Women to Normalized Families in Czechoslovakia. Sexualities. SAGE, 2016, Vol. 19, 1-2, p. 211-235. ISSN 1363-4607. Available from: https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1363460715614246.

Basic information

• Original name: Sex under Socialism. From Emancipation of Women to Normalized Families in Czechoslovakia.
• Authors: LIŠKOVÁ, Kateřina (203 Czech Republic, guarantor, belonging to the institution).
• Edition: Sexualities, SAGE, 2016, 1363-4607.

Other information

• Original 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
• WWW: URL URL
• Impact factor: Impact factor: 0.922
• RIV identification code: RIV/00216224:14230/16:00090530
• Organization unit: Faculty of Social Studies
• Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1363460715614246
• UT WoS: 000368833300013
• Keywords in English: Czechoslovakia; Eastern Europe; sexology; sexual advice books; sexuality and gender; socialism
• Tags: International impact, Reviewed

Abstract

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.