Book Discussion: Polish Sexual Revolutions. Negotiating Sexuality and Modernity behind the Iron Curtain, by Anna Dobrowolska

Session Submission Type: Book Discussion Roundtable

Brief Description

The roundtable focuses on the recently uncovered genealogies of East Central European debates on sexuality, departing from Anna Dobrowolska’s forthcoming monograph Polish Sexual Revolutions. Negotiating Sexuality and Modernity behind the Iron Curtain (Oxford University Press, August 2025). The book studies the history of sexuality in state-socialist Poland in its European and global context, focusing on how communism transformed both sexual discourses and intimate practices between 1945 and 1989. It reconfigures the definition of the sexual revolution to complicate our understanding of ‘sexual modernity’ and ‘progress.’ The book questions the dominant memory frameworks which portray the sexual revolution as an essentially Western phenomenon and Eastern Europe as constantly lagging behind and catching up with the West. The participants will discuss the book’s main arguments in connection with their own research interests: Mark Cornwall’s expertise in Czech LGBTQ history and secret police archives; Juliane Fürst’s experience in researching alternative subcultures and the long Perestroika in the Soviet Union; Anita Kurimay’s focus on queer history in twentieth century Hungary. They will be joined by Anna Dobrowolska, the author of the book. The panel will be moderated by Michaela Appeltova, whose research centers the history of sexuality and the body in state-socialist Czechoslovakia. The transnational framing will enable participants to set the book’s arguments in the broader context of the emerging field of history of sexuality in East Central Europe as well as the new, innovative methodologies for studying the end of the Cold War and the memory of the post-socialist transformation.

Sub Unit

• Gender/LGBTQ Studies

Chair

• Michaela Appeltova, Wake Forest U

Roundtable Speakers

• Anna Dobrowolska, U of Basel (Switzerland)

• Juliane Fuerst, Centre for Contemporary History (Germany) / Central European U (Austria)

• Anita Kurimay, Bryn Mawr College