Routledge Handbook of Sexuality in East Central Europe

This handbook provides an overview of scholarly research on sexuality in East Central Europe for both students and academics, focusing on the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, from the late nineteenth century to the present.

The collection is organized into eight sections covering major areas of research including non-normative sexualities; family, marriage, and kinship; race/ethnicity and nationalism; birth, health, and reproduction; religion; sex, work, and mobility; violence; and sex education. The chapters highlight the breadth and depth of current scholarship on the region, past and present. The contributions present cutting-edge research treating each of the East Central European countries on its own terms and contextualizing sexual meanings, practices, and dynamics in relation to the specific ways they have been shaped, experienced, represented, and contested in the lives of people across these territories. In doing so, the book underscores the differences in the region’s trajectories of sexuality and sexual politics from those of not only the West but also Russia/USSR and (former) Yugoslavia across the long twentieth century.

Written by a multidisciplinary team of international experts, The Routledge Handbook of Sexuality in East Central Europe is an ideal resource for scholars of European history, gender studies, anthropology, and sociology.

Chapter 21 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA) 4.0 license.

Agnieszka Kościańska is Professor in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw, Poland. Her recent books include To See a Moose: The History of Polish Sex Education (2021) and Gender, Pleasure, and Violence: The Construction of Expert Knowledge of Sexuality in Poland (2021).

Anita Kurimay is an Associate Professor of History and Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bryn Mawr College, USA. She is the author of Queer Budapest, 1873–1961 (2020) and has published articles on the histories of sexual politics and sexual science in Hungary.

Kateřina Lišková is Associate Professor and Senior Researcher at the Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciences. She authored Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945–1989 (2018) and writes about the history of sexuality, gender, and health with expertise in comparative and transnational perspectives.

Hadley Z. Renkin is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna. His research focuses on East European sexual geotemporalities and Hungarian sexual politics. He has published on postsocialist sexual politics, East European sexual science, and the (dis)connections between anthropological and queer theories.