The science of sex in a space of uncertainty: Naturalizing and modernizing Europe's East,past and present

Abstract

In the light of the recent resurgence of homophobia and gender panic, the increasing prevalence of HIV/AIDS, ongoing concerns about pervasive sexual violence and trafficking, intensely sexualized and racialized tensions over immigration and fears of demographic crisis, and renewed attempts to restrict the legal, social, and reproductive rights of women and LGBT people across postsocialist Eastern Europe, sexuality has become a site of great salience and concern in the region, pivotal to struggles over a range of different forms and practices of citizenship and belonging, and a crucial hinge of moral and political boundary-making between Europe's East and West (Graff, 2010; Kościańska, 2014b; Kulpa, 2013; Renkin, 2009, 2015).¹

While extensive studies on gender under socialism and postsocialism have long existed (Berry, 1995; Funk and Mueller, 1993; Gal and Kligman, 2000; Johnson and Robinson, 2006; Penn and Massimo, 2009), the past decade and a half has seen an impressive proliferation of research on postsocialist sexualities and sexual politics. Such work has illuminated the emergence of queer identities, spaces, communities, and social movements (Essig, 1999; Long, 1999; Renkin, 2007; Stella, 2012), the impact of the politicized silences of the socialist past – and resistances to them – on sexual identities and activisms (Essig, 1999; Gruszczynska, 2009; Long, 1999), the connections between resurgent nationalisms and misogynist and homophobic politics (Gal and Kligman, 2000; Graff, 2006; Kulpa, 2011; Renkin, 2009; Waitt, 2005), the heteronormativity of popular and literary representations (Baer, 2009; Moss, 1995), as well as the transnational articulations and tensions that shape the discourses and practices of sexual political activisms (Binnie and Klesse, 2011; Kościańska, 2012; Kulpa and Mizielinska, 2011; Renkin, 2009, 2015; Stychin, 2004; Woodcock, 2011).

Many of the mentioned works map the late socialist and postsocialist histories underlying key aspects of present sexualities and sexual politics. Yet despite the tremendous recent growth of scholarly literatures expanding our knowledge of the history of sexuality in general, as well as specifically in Europe (both insightfully reviewed by Herzog 2009 and 2013, respectively), the importance of excavating the older histories of sexuality which have shaped Europe's postsocialist present, and its thinking about sexuality and its personal, social, and political significances, has been, as Herzog (2013) notes, relatively neglected. Recently emerging scholarship is beginning to direct attention to such concerns, as new and important studies on sex work under late Habsburg rule (Stauter-Halsted, 2011; Wingfield, 2011), sexual intimacies in East Germany (McLellan, 2011), and queer urban life in late 19th- and early 20th-century Budapest (Kurimay, 2012) demonstrate. Much of the balance of research on the history of Eastern European sexualities, however, has focused on Russia and the Soviet Union (e.g. Engelstein, 1994; Healey, 2009; Naiman, 1999); the specific roots of sexual regimes elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe still require further investigation.

Moreover, while since Foucault, science has been seen as central to the meanings and effects of both modern concepts of sexuality and modern biopolitics more generally, and histories of sexual science have been powerful analytical and theoretical tools for thinking about sexuality as personally, socially, and politically consequential in both Western Europe and the West's colonial encounters, surprisingly little attention has been paid to its presence and implications in scholarship on Central and Eastern Europe sexualities. As Stauter-Halsted and Wingfield (2011: 216–217) note, despite the fact that Central and Eastern Europe were at the very center of scientific and legal research on sex and sexuality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the study of sexuality and its science in the region is ‘still in its nascent stages.’ Here too, important work is beginning to emerge (Kościańska, 2014a; Lišková, 2013; see also the special May 2011 issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality edited by Stauter-Halsted and Wingfield). Yet, as already mentioned, much current research has focused on Russia and the Soviet Union (e.g. Healey, 2009; Kowalski, 2009) at the expense of Central and Eastern European sexual-scientific histories. In addition, the critical potential that science can have for not only naturalizing sexual identities and relationships and their social and political meanings, but for the linking of these naturalized meanings to their lasting effects on the borders of Europeanness and modernity – and thus their significance for present tensions over sexuality between Europe's East and West – remains to be fully examined. We believe, however, that the role of science as discourse and practice is critical to fully understanding Central and Eastern European histories of sexuality and their legacies. Histories of sexual science, we contend, are particularly productive lenses through which to investigate how sex and sexuality have been deployed with respect to Europe's East in order to mark, contest, yet also render natural different visions of the borders of modernity and authentic Europeanness – processes of definition and resistance which continue to structure current debates about gendered and sexual identities and politics, subjectivity and citizenship, as well as tolerance and democracy, in the region today. Our goal is therefore not only to fill gaps and tell unknown stories, but also – following the call of Kulpa and Mizielinska (2011) and others to make the postsocialist East a source of theory on sexuality (and more) as well as a site for the application of western theories – to contribute, on theoretical, paradigmatic and methodological levels, to current understandings of the historical configurations of sexual science, and their critical roles in the production and mediation of much broader symbolic and political borders, past and present.

The idea for this special issue emerged during the 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists meetings in Nanterre, France, where we organized a panel on ‘The science of sex in a space of uncertainty: Naturalizing and modernizing Europe's east, past and present.’ A cooperative effort between young and more established scholars, the panel also combined the scholarly traditions of both eastern and western universities. The workshop focused on ethnographic, historical and sociological analyses of the role of science in processes of naturalizing and modernizing sexuality, as well as the ways in which modernity itself came to be defined in relation to sexuality in Central and Eastern Europe from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. Both the papers presented and the discussion they engendered suggest that scholars within and outside the postsocialist region are deeply engaged in research that promises to reshape not only the anthropology of the region, but also its histories of sexuality.²

The four articles in this special issue address discourses, practices, and implications of the science of sex in Central and Eastern Europe across a wide geographical and temporal range. In his article ‘Biopolitical mythologies: Róheim, Freud, (homo)phobia, and the sexual science of Eastern European Otherness,’ Hadley Z Renkin focuses on how certain historical intersections between the sciences of folklore, ethnography, and psychoanalysis used sexuality in order to construct Eastern Europe as a ‘factish’ (Latour, 2011) space of sexual and civilizational difference: a naturalized space of uncertainty and failed modernity; the West's internal sexual Other – thus constituting a powerful foundation for contemporary scientific constructions of postsocialist Eastern European sexual politics as the mirror of western sexual tolerance. Renkin's article sheds light on the deep historical roots of current views of the postsocialist East's inherent homophobia, and its innate difference from the West's more modern and cultivated sexual tolerance. It argues that the historical relationships between science, sexuality, geography, and temporality are central to understanding what our concept of ‘homophobia’ is and does, and particularly its key role in securing the internal biopolitical borders of modern Europeanness.

Attila Kund's paper ‘“Duties for her race and nation”: Scientistic racist views on sexuality and reproduction in 1920s Hungary’, also analyses early 20th-century scientific discourses of sexuality. Kund focuses on Hungarian racial scientific discourses of the 1920s, arguing that Hungarian race scientists, in ways shaped by both the theories of western race science and contemporary nationalist discourses, constructed sexuality as central to the properly raced and gendered reproduction of the Magyars, thus strongly naturalizing and so significantly supporting both the scientific and more overtly political sexist and anti-Semitic claims then increasingly dominating Hungarian society. The science of sexuality was thus critical to Hungary's mapping of both its unique location within broader geographies of racial and sexual difference, and its relation to the sexual-scientific discourses and practices of modern biopolitics – dual efforts whose history continues to justify both internal and external narratives of Hungary's present difference from, and uncertain relationship to, a tolerant, civilized West.

Katerina Lišková, in turn, focuses on Czechoslovakia. In the 20th century Czechoslovakian sexology developed dramatically: the Sexological Institute in Prague was established in 1921, only two years after the foundation of Hirschfeld's Berlin institute. Analyzing sexological writings from the 1950s and the 1970s, Lišková claims that in the case of Czechoslovakian sexuality we can observe a process opposite to that of western sexual ‘liberalization.’ Writings from the 1950s were far more progressive than those from the 1970s, as after the Prague Spring Czechoslovakian society went through a process of ‘normalization.’ In Czechoslovakia, Lišková concludes:
Sexologists functioned as important mediators of these categories for the general public as they interpreted what it meant to be a man or a woman or advised how to live happily in marital and sexual unions. Gendered and sexual selves were recast in sexological treatises and self-help books on marriage over the decades.

Lišková thus expands Nikolas Rose's interpretation of the causes and effects of the ‘psy-ences’, arguing that they were not solely products of capitalist societies and relations. Her account, however, also challenges what historian Dagmar Herzog (2009) calls ‘the liberalization paradigm’ in the study of the history of sexuality, revealing alternative trajectories of biopolitical modernity.

Finally, Agnieszka Kościańska discusses the specific development of sexology in Poland from the 1970s to the present. Sexology was an important discipline under socialism in Poland as well, she observes. Socialist sexological books were both popular and influential: Wislocka's 1978 The Art of Love, for example, sold 7 million copies. Kościańska argues that sexological works in socialist Poland were fundamentally interdisciplinary, perceiving sexuality as multidimensional, and that they resulted from mutual dialog between sexologists and their patients. As a result, she notes, Polish socialist sexologists also represented important public expressions of broader, contemporary social concerns, such as the problem of women's double burden. Despite this, however, she claims that ultimately socialist sexologists offered very conservative solutions to these concerns, such as the re-installment of a traditional gender division of labor. More recently, however, Kościańska notes, feminist activism has resulted in the reconfiguration of sexological assumptions about gender and sexuality, and the inclusion of feminism in mainstream sexological discourses and practices. She thus, like Lišková, describes a situation importantly different from the Foucauldian vision of western sexology as a disciplining power whose construction and deployment left little space for individual or collective agency, and an alternative picture of the nature and impact of modern sexual science in Europe's East.

Together these articles trace the multiple and shifting contexts and consequences of the relationship between science and sexuality in Central and Eastern Europe over the course of the 20th century. They emphasize both national and transnational models and connections, and pressures scientific and political, in order to map key intersections and divergences between western and eastern sexual sciences and their personal, social, and political effects. Dagmar Herzog, echoing much recent work on the globalization of sexuality (Altman, 2001; Binnie, 2004) and the transnational meanings of sexual politics (Butler, 2008; Fassin, 2010; Puar, 2007), has recently argued that we are living in an era of ‘the geopoliticization of sex and gender’ (Herzog, 2013: 310). While agreeing wholeheartedly with this assessment, with our work in this special issue we hope to highlight the fact that (as postcolonial scholars of sexuality have shown us: see Bleys, 1995; Stoler, 1995) we have all long been living in such an era, and that – as in the case of all histories of sexuality – it is the historical depth, as well as the geographical organization, of such processes that gives them their social, political, and personal force.

Herzog (2013: 313) has also argued that pursuing Eastern European histories of sexuality has the potential to reveal the ‘alternate modernities’ of the East. In constructing this special issue, we have attempted to undertake this challenge. Yet we hope to argue that such histories, especially through their production of intimate and shifting relationships between science, sexuality, and spatial and temporal belonging, have also served as critical instruments in the construction of not only these alternate modernities, but their very alterity, and the diverse biopolitical meanings both bear.

The works in this special issue thus show the complex and multiple character of Central and Eastern Europe's locally emergent and specific sexual sciences, and their multiple and divergent implications. While Renkin's and Kund's articles reveal some of the ways that sexual science in Hungary in the early 20th century was used in order to construct Europe's East as a space of negative difference and uncertain European and modern belonging, both Lišková and Kościańska tell stories of how socialist sexual science functioned to construct the Central and Eastern European socialist societies of the mid-20th century in ways at times repressive, at others empowering and positive. Both trajectories, in relation to the practices and effects of western sexual scientific modernity, represent Othernesses, divergences, alternatives. The tensions between them, we believe, raise crucial uncertainties about our current thinking about the role of science and sex in the production of both modern biopolitics and the borders of modernity itself.

Thus, our special issue argues for a more complex history of sexuality and its relationship to both science and politics, one that is simultaneously liberatory and normativizing and, in its linking of these fused processes to specific spaces, times, and borders, critically constitutive of the geotemporal components of modern biopolitics. Understanding such scientific histories, we believe, is also crucial to grasping the complex causes and effects of sexuality's current central presence in postsocialist politics – and its current salience in the broader European and global arena. It is, we contend, these histories of naturalized difference, and their scientifically constructed borders of sexual knowledge and value, that underpin and generate a wide range of current confrontation, from ‘homophobic’ attacks by right-wing nationalists on LGBT Marches in Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere, to responses to them that risk the production of new forms of postsocialist Others, both queer and straight, to new laws and Constitutions throughout the region which define marriage as a specifically heterosexual institution and attempting to criminalize ‘gay propaganda’, to the recent emergence of ‘gender panic’ in Poland and other postsocialist countries. Yet these same scientific histories have also naturalized the borders through which such events are interpreted and reacted to as ‘regional’, and through which they have so often been understood as part of a ‘normal’ geography of European difference. This special issue thus argues for the need to see the effects of sexuality's scientific – and political – pasts on its political – and scientific – presents, and the ways in which the relationship between Europe's East and West has been, and remains, central to both. In this way, these works and our special issue strive to challenge and expand the typically understood temporal and geographic boundaries of modern biopolitics.

Footnotes

Notes

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