Categories
Announcement

Women and sexual health: The intersections of medical science and politics during state socialism in East-Central Europe

Please join us for our third Fall 2022 meeting of the Gender & Transformation in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia workshop (In-person and Zoom)

Kateřina Lišková

Associate Professor, Masaryk University, Czechia

Friday, Nov. 4, 2022

2pm to 3pm

European Union Studies Center,

CUNY Graduate Center

365 5th Avenue, New York

Room 5203

With the advent of socialism, East-Central European (ECE) states emphasized women’s equality. I will show the unexpected progress brought to the fore by medical science in women’s sexual health. Drawing on my own and my team’s research on Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, I will focus on the first postwar decade during which abortion on demand was legalized in most ECE countries, and gynecological and pregnancy care became institutionalized. During the 1950s, medical doctors in all ECE countries focused on female reproductive capacities in the new context of women’s growing participation in the labor force. Gynecologists debated whether work presented risks to pregnancies and concluded that paid jobs actually improved women’s chances at healthy childbearing because of socialist legislation regulating work safety, improved access to gynecological check-ups and, importantly, thanks to equality and better economic standing the working status brought to women. However, experts scolded housework for posing a danger to pregnant women: often, hard work, without any regulations, was exhausting to women and underscored their unequal status compared to men. The 1950s also marked the beginning of medical experts’ sustained attention to women’s marital and sexual satisfaction. While the Western-centered accounts place women’s liberation, including in sexual and reproductive lives, in the 1960s/70s, I will argue for an earlier and systemic liberation that took place in the 1950s in the countries of the Cold War East-Central Europe. I will underscore the vital role experts played in these developments.

In person RSVP: mara.lazda@bcc.cuny.edu

on Zoom, Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIqceirrDwpHtcw3BT-rOHoi3HMPgwVmoSN

We ask that participants read the paper before the workshop, which we will share with registered participants one week in advance. After a brief presentation by Prof. Lišková, most of the workshop will be devoted to discussion.

Note for in-person attendees: ID and proof of vaccination or negative PCR test within 7 days required.

Kateřina Lišková, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in sociology at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. Her research focuses on gender, sexuality, expertise, and the social organization of intimacy, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. She is also affiliated as a guest researcher with the Department of History and Art History of Utrecht University. 

In 2021, she was a Senior Fellow at the Descartes Center for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities. As a Marie Curie fellow, she was affiliated with Columbia University and Technische Universität in Berlin. Previously, she was at the New School for Social Research as a Fulbright Scholar; a Visiting Scholar with New York University; and a Fellow with the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena, Germany. Cambridge University Press published her previous research in a monograph titled Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945–89, which won the 2019 Barbara Heldt Prize for Best Book and received an honorable mention for the 2019 Adele E. Clarke Book Award.

Her papers have appeared in Medical History, History of the Human Sciences, History of Psychology, Sexualities, and History of the Family. She serves as an Editorial Board member for the European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health.

Categories
Presentations

Resisting Genderphobia in Hungary

Please join us for our second Fall 2022 meeting of the Gender & Transformation in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia workshop (Zoom only):

Judit Takacs

Research Professor, Centre for Social Sciences – Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence, Budapest, Hungary

Friday, Oct. 7

2-3PM New York City time

By analysing relevant pieces of legislation and policy documents, we show how genderphobia became a fundamental feature of an expanding far-right agenda that has been playing out in practice since the “System of National Cooperation” was established in Hungary in 2010. Genderphobia is the aversion of disrupting dominant gender and sexual hierarchies, by addressing and critically interrogating gendered differences and gender as a social construct. Genderphobia is both an ideology about the fearfulness of gender as well as the action of fear mongering for political effect. State institutions are gendered and sexualized in that they have been structured on dominant gender and sexual norms that reinforce male and heterosexual dominance. We argue that genderphobia is evident in the rise of anti-LGBTIQ policies and contributes to the weakening of democratic and liberal institutions in Hungary. We will also present examples of the Hungarian government’s attempts to monopolise the definition of “the family” and hollow out the social representation of child protection. In addition, we will explore resistance against the recent anti-LGBTIQ policies through children’s literature

Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUtdumvpz8iHtUafvaXkj0W_X6S5k14YUPG

We ask that participants read the paper before the workshop, which we will share with registered participants one week in advance. After a brief presentation of the paper, most of the workshop will be devoted to discussion.