This handbook provides an overview of scholarly research on sexuality in East Central Europe for both students and academics, focusing on the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, from the late nineteenth century to the present.
The collection is organised into eight sections covering major areas of research including: non-normative sexualities; family, marriage, and kinship; race/ethnicity and nationalism; birth, health, and reproduction; religion; sex, work, and mobility; violence; and sex education. The chapters highlight the breadth and depth of current scholarship on the region, past and present. The contributions present cutting-edge research treating each of the East Central European countries on its own terms and contextualising sexual meanings, practices, and dynamics in relation to the specific ways they have been shaped, experienced, represented, and contested in the lives of people across the territories. In doing so, the book underscores the differences in the regions trajectories of sexuality and sexual politics from those of not only the West, but also Russia/USSR and (former) Yugoslavia across the long twentieth century.
Written by a multidisciplinary team of international experts, The Routledge Handbook of Sexuality in East Central Europe is an ideal resource for scholars of European history, gender studies, anthropology, and sociology.
This handbook provides an overview of scholarly research on sexuality in East Central Europe for both students and academics, focusing on the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, from the late nineteenth century to the present.
Introduction Section 1: Non-normative sexualities Section introduction
1. Homosexuality in interwar Poland
2. Lesbian lives under Hungarian
state-socialism, in the mirror of psychiatry
3. Homosexuality and activism in
state-socialist and postsocialist Poland
4. Silence, invisibility, and
emancipation. Articulating LGB identities in socialist Czechoslovakia
5. A
cross-border lesbian romance? The reception of Kįroly Makks Another Way in
Poland and Hungary
6. A brief history of Hungarian queer politics in the 20th
and 21st centuries Section 2: Sexuality, family, marriage, and kinship
Section introduction
7. Marriages and nations before World War II
8.
Socialist marriage and sexual satisfaction in Czechoslovakia and Hungary
9.
Divorce during socialism in Czechoslovakia and womens equality
10.
Egalitarian myth and its implementation by families of choice in Poland
11.
The father is a man, the mother is a woman? Notions of family within the
Hungarian LGBTQ community Section 3: Sexuality, race/ethnicity & nationalism
Section introduction
12. Eugenics and ethnic nationalism in interwar Hungary
13. Some babies are better than others. Selective pronatalism, ethnicity and
sexuality politics behind the Iron Curtain
14. The role of sex education in
Russian propaganda: The Czech Republic
15. Race on trial: Understanding
sexualized racism in socialist and postsocialist Poland
16. Looking for
heterosexuality in the imaginary East: The role of sexualities for the
illiberal Hungarian project Section 4: Birth control, reproduction, health
Section introduction
17. Transnational aspects of family planning: Interwar
and state-socialist Poland
18. Limitations, innovations, and imitations:
Chemical contraceptives in communist Poland
19. Childbirth and parent
education in the state-socialist Czechoslovakia
20. I dont go into this
issue with my patients. Motherhood and sexuality of women with Turner
Syndrome in Poland
21. Risk, responsibility and pleasure: HIV politics in
Poland Section 5: Religion Section introduction
22. Masturbating in Yiddish:
Jewish bodies and voices from Eastern Europe
23. Conflict or a united front?
Sexuality between Church and State in postwar Poland
24. The World Congress
of Families
25. The debate on homosexuality in Poland during the 2000s and
the lord-boor game Section 6: Sex work and mobility Section introduction
26.
Wayward daughters and runaway servants: The lost girls of Central Europe and
the construction of the trafficking trope
27. Sex and military: Soldiers,
prostitution, venereal diseases in the Great War in Hungary
28. Italian men,
Western goods and transactional sex during the long 1960s in Hungary
29. A
profitable enterprise? Sex work, economic emancipation, and transnational
mobility in 1970s and 1980s Poland
30. Cruising communist Poland in
contemporary Polish art practices
31. Between East and West and digital
elsewhere: Polish queer migrants making sense of Brexit Section 7: Sexualized
violence Section introduction
32. Sexuality, imprisonment, and violence in
counterrevolutionary Hungary, 19191922
33. Operation Hyacinth and the
history of state violence in the Peoples Republic of Poland
34. Fair game
for stigmatization due to his predilections: Homophobia and sexism in the
criminological discourse of rape
35. Do we care? Intergenerational discussion
about the first campaign against gender-based violence in Slovakia
36. Blind
justice: Hungarian policies on violence against women and girls Section 8:
Sex education Section introduction
37. Sexuality and gender in school-based
sex education in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland in the 1970s and 1980s
38. The right to citizenship: Sexology, homosexuality and the discourse of
rights in socialist Poland in the 1970s
39. Self-education as activism: The
case of trans persons in Poland
40. Who is responsible for sex education? The
divisions of family and school, private and public after 1989 in Slovakia
41.
Sexual minorities in post-socialist sex education in Hungary 20 years of an
LGBT+ school programme
Agnieszka Kociaska is Professor in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw, Poland. Her recent books include To See a Moose: The History of Polish Sex Education (2021) and Gender, Pleasure, and Violence: The Construction of Expert Knowledge of Sexuality in Poland (2021).
Anita Kurimay is an Associate Professor of History and Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bryn Mawr College, USA. She is the author of Queer Budapest, 18731961 (2020) and has published articles on the histories of sexual politics and sexual science in Hungary.
Kateina Likovį is Associate Professor and Senior Researcher at the Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciences. She authored Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 19451989 (2018) and writes about the history of sexuality, gender, and health with expertise in comparative and transnational perspectives.
Hadley Z. Renkin is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna. His research focuses on East European sexual geotemporalities and Hungarian sexual politics. He has published on postsocialist sexual politics, East European sexual science, and the (dis)connections between anthropological and queer theories.
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