The Routledge Handbook of Sexuality in East Central Europe

Introduction

Section 1: Non-normative sexualities

Section introduction

1. Homosexuality in interwar Poland

Kamil Karczewski

2. Lesbian lives under Hungarian state-socialism, in the mirror of psychiatry

Anna Borgos

3. Homosexuality and activism in state-socialist and postsocialist Poland

Tomasz Basiuk

4. Silence, invisibility, and emancipation. Articulating LGB identities in socialist Czechoslovakia

Jaroslava Hasmanová Marhánková

5. A cross-border lesbian romance? The reception of Károly Makk’s Another Way in Poland and Hungary

Monika Talarczyk

6. A brief history of Hungarian queer politics in the 20^th and 21^st centuries

Anita Kurimay and Hadley Z. Renkin

Section 2: Sexuality, family, marriage, and kinship

Section introduction

7. Marriages and nations before World War II

Sándor Nagy

8. Socialist marriage and sexual satisfaction in Czechoslovakia and Hungary

Kateřina Lišková and Gábor Szegedi

9. Divorce during socialism in Czechoslovakia and women’s equality

Kateřina Lišková

10. Egalitarian myth and its implementation by families of choice in Poland

Joanna Mizielińska

11. The father is a man, the mother is a woman? Notions of family within the Hungarian LGBTQ community

Rita Béres-Deák

Section 3: Sexuality, race/ethnicity, and nationalism

Section introduction

12. Eugenics and ethnic nationalism in interwar Hungary

Anita Kurimay

13. Some babies are better than others. Selective pronatalism, ethnicity and sexuality politics behind the Iron Curtain

Radka Dudová and Hana Hašková

14. The role of sex education in Russian propaganda: The Czech Republic

Lucie Jarkovská

15. Race on trial: Understanding sexualized racism in socialist and postsocialist Poland

Agnieszka Kościańska

16. Looking for heterosexuality in the imaginary East: The role of sexualities for the illiberal Hungarian project

 Zsuzsanna Varga and Katrin Kremmler

Section 4: Birth control, reproduction, and health

Section introduction

17. Transnational aspects of family planning: Interwar and state-socialist Poland

Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska

18. Limitations, innovations, and imitations: Chemical contraceptives in communist Poland

Agata Ignaciuk

19. Childbirth and parent education in the state-socialist Czechoslovakia

Ema Hrešanová

20. “I don’t go into this issue with my patients.” Motherhood and sexuality of women with Turner Syndrome in Poland

Magdalena Radkowska-Walkowicz

21. Risk, responsibility and pleasure: HIV politics in Poland

Agata Dziuban and Justyna Struzik

Section 5: Religion

Section introduction

22. Masturbating in Yiddish: Jewish bodies and voices from Eastern Europe

Zohar Eeda Weiman-Kelman

23. Conflict or a united front? Sexuality between Church and State in postwar Poland

Natalia Jarska

24. The World Congress of Families

Kevin M. Moss

25. The debate on homosexuality in Poland during the 2000s and the lord-boor game

Dorota Hall

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

Keely Stauter-Halsted and Nancy M. Wingfield

27. Sex and military: Soldiers, prostitution, venereal diseases in the Great War in Hungary

Judit Forrai

28. Italian men, Western goods and transactional sex during the long 1960s in Hungary

Priska Komaromi

29. A profitable enterprise? Sex work, economic emancipation, and transnational mobility in 1970s and 1980s Poland

Anna Dobrowolska

30. Cruising communist Poland in contemporary Polish art practices

Aleksandra Gajowy

31. Between East and West and digital elsewhere: Polish queer migrants making sense of Brexit

Łukasz Szulc

Section 7: Sexualized violence

Section introduction

32. Sexuality, imprisonment, and violence in counterrevolutionary Hungary, 1919–1922

Emily Gioielli

33. Operation Hyacinth and the history of state violence in the People’s Republic of Poland

Jędrzej Burszta

34. “Fair game for stigmatization due to his predilections”: Homophobia and sexism in the criminological discourse of rape

Agnieszka Kościańska

35. Do we care? Intergenerational discussion about the first campaign against gender-based violence in Slovakia

Zuzana Maďarová

36. Blind justice: Hungarian policies on violence against women and girls

Katalin Fábián

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 

Kateřina Lišková, Natalia Jarska and Gábor Szegedi

38. “The right to citizenship”: Sexology, homosexuality and the discourse of rights in socialist Poland in the 1970s 

Agnieszka Kościańska

39. Self-education as activism: The case of trans persons in Poland

Maria Dębińska

40. Who is responsible for sex education? The divisions of family and school, private and public after 1989 in Slovakia

Veronika Valkovičová and Adriana Jesenková

41. Sexual minorities in post-socialist sex education in Hungary – 20 years of an LGBT+ school programme

Dorottya Rédai

Biography

Agnieszka Kościańska 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, 1873–1961 (2020) and has published articles on the histories of sexual politics and sexual science in Hungary.

Kateřina Lišková 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, 1945–1989 (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.