The Other Sexual Revolutions: Socialist Visions of Sexual Liberation

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel integrates East Central Europe into the narratives of postwar sexual revolutions. The papers examine new research on gender and sexuality in late socialist societies: the proliferation of pornographic imagery in post-1960s Poland; explicit nudity in late socialist Budapest and Western fantasies thereof; and popular understandings of sexualized bodies as tools of self-realization in Czechoslovakia. Together, the papers argue that the sexual revolution in East Central Europe was neither limited to the brief opening of the late 1960s nor reversed in the following decades. In doing so, the panel furthers recent investigations of the transnational character of the 1960s upheavals and contributes to the emerging literature on the “global 1970s.”

Sub Unit

• Gender/LGBTQ Studies

Chair

• Roy Albert Kimmey, University of Notre Dame

Papers

• 'Under Every Roof': Regulating and Practicing Pornography in State-Socialist Poland - Anna Dobrowolska, U of Basel (Switzerland)

• Beyond the Conservative Turn: Gender in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia - Michaela Appeltova, Wake Forest U

• In Lieu of a Sexual Revolution in 80s and 90s Romania: Private and Public Traces of Nonconformity - Ramona Dima, Södertörn U (Sweden)

Discussant

• Jill Massino, UNC at Charlotte