Sadistic Woman in State-Socialist Czechoslovakia: Nosological Continuities and Discontinuities

• In Event: Falling by the Wayside: Expertise on Unwanted Children, Youth Criminals, and Sadistic Women in Socialist Czechoslovakia and Poland

Abstract

When sadism was first medically defined in the early 1890s by the Austria-based German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, it was conceived as inherently gendered; a “pathological enhancement of the male sexual character,” making female sadism an issue of “partial viraginity” (masculinization).
This paper will focus on what role gendered conceptualizations of sadism such as these played more than half a century later in state-socialist Czechoslovakia and what new ideas emerged. I will analyze continuities and discontinuities in the medical conceptualization of a sadistic woman in the Czechoslovak state-socialist medical discourse and explore how the experts drew on previous nosologies, both transnational (e.g. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Albert von Schrenck-Notzig, Dimitry Stefanowsky) and national (e.g. Václav Bělohradský), what knowledge was reproduced, what was modified, as well as how the new aspects of the notions of feminine sadism developed with regard to contemporary knowledge.
Sexologists typically saw fewer “perverted women” than they identified “perverted men”; therefore, I will explore how the expert explanations of this disproportion shifted in time and with regard to socio-cultural changes in state socialism.
I will base this analysis on various medical sources, such as journals, encyclopedias, and textbooks. In this paper, I aim to explore the social and gendered aspects of female sadism as conceptualized in the medical discourse of the state-socialist Czechoslovakia; what role “being a woman” played in “being a sadist” and vice versa, and what continuities and discontinuities can be traced.

Author

• Theo Finsterschott, Charles U in Prague (Czech Republic)