'Under Every Roof': Regulating and Practicing Pornography in State-Socialist Poland

• In Event: The Other Sexual Revolutions: Socialist Visions of Sexual Liberation

Abstract

The paper analyzes how pornography was defined, debated, and criminalized in state-socialist Poland from 1956 to 1989. By analyzing anti-pornography legislation and criminological discourse, as well as actual investigations into alleged distribution of pornography, the paper argues that the approach toward “indecent” images under communist rule was relatively lenient and that control lessened over time, except for homosexual erotica. The paper also traces how the emergence of a new technology – videotapes – contributed to the market of illegal erotica’s expansion and diversification in the 1980s, attesting to the notable convergence of erotic imaginaries on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Author

• Anna Dobrowolska, U of Basel (Switzerland)