Queer Presences and Absences

Yvette Taylor, Michelle Addison

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137314352
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores changes and continuations in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer lives, identities and spatial practices in the 21st century from around the globe, using a range of methods to connect pasts, places and policies with contemporary times, linking individual and social presences (and absences) affectively and materially.

Part I

Queer Movements, Marginalities and Mainstreams

1

‘Against the Dignity of Man’: Sexology Constructing Deviance During ‘Normalisation’ in Czechoslovakia

Kateřina Lišková

Introduction

Normalisation is the official name for the period following the failure of Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring of 1968, which had a tangible impact on the ways in which citizens were able to identify and express their sexuality. The 1960s were a time of changing political climate not only in Western Europe and the United States, but also in some Soviet ‘satellites’. In Czechoslovakia, calls for reform and political emancipation went hand in hand with cultural awakening and artistic experimentation. The prevailing political effort was to ‘humanise’ socialism and steer it away from rigid post-Stalinism. This social upheaval and hopeful anticipation culminated in the Prague Spring; however, the Soviet tanks came on 21 August 1968 and quashed the hopes of millions of people wishing to live under ‘socialism with human face’ (Křen, 2005). A reconstructed political cadre came to power with a new slogan – ‘the normalization of conditions’ (Křen, 2005). Its aim was to eradicate any opposition and extinguish any spark of revolt. The regime oscillated on ‘the border between authoritarianism and (exhausted) totalitarianism’ (Křen, 2005: 874), requiring conformity from its citizens and their political obedience.

The re-established communist order enforced a regimentation of public life that encouraged retreat into private life. Contrary to the previous decades, active participation and belief in communism were no longer expected, it sufficed not to protest and to blend into the crowd. Citizens were to become uniform and deviation from the norm was not tolerated (Holý, 2001: 21). This social contract was ‘based on (mutual) hypocrisy and lies’ (Křen, 2005: 875). The emerging atmosphere of normalisation, characterised by stillness and hopelessness, and described as ‘the Eastern iceberg, because life in those countries was ossified and motionless and as if frozen’ (Ouředník, 2006: 68), lasted with only few changes until November 1989.

Various scholars have since analysed what was happening politically in this time period (Kaplan, 1993; Vykoukal, Litera and Tejchman, 2000; Holý, 2001; Křen, 2005); activities of protest have been well documented by historians, there are oral histories of key political figures, dissenters as well as those persecuted by the regime in their everyday lives.¹ Interestingly, what is absent are analyses of the scholarly disciplines, especially those pertaining to the everyday lives of people. Two decades after the regime change, we still lack accounts of how science functioned in communist society, particularly a science directly affecting one of the most intimate areas of people’s lives – that of sexuality. This absence can be partially explained by the fact that communist power curtailed science and research with the exception of deploying it to serve the needs of the Party and the state.

Today it might seem that ‘communist’ scholarship would simplistically mirror the Party line, resulting in superficial and thus analytically uninteresting research. These days normalisation is customarily presented as ‘the Eastern iceberg’ – a period in which nothing changed, social life – including science – stood still and was limited to mere reproduction. I want to challenge this view. Unlike disciplines studying people and their relationships that were banned or severely restricted, such as sociology or philosophy, sexology enjoyed a special status under communism. Never banned by the Party, sexology continued to exist throughout the whole communist period. However, the object of its study invoked a certain marginalisation; since its beginnings in the nineteenth century, sexology was at risk of being ridiculed both for its ‘lowly’ object and exclusion from public understanding and scrutiny via its inaccessible language (Weeks, 1985). The combination of official tolerance and relative obscurity created a niche that granted sexology not only uninterrupted development but even space for the formation of a field relatively free of constraining oversight.

In this chapter, I will analyse sexological texts written and published during ‘normalisation’ (1969–89). My aim is to juxtapose normalisation as a historical era with the scientific understanding of its opposite, deviance. Analysing the discursive renderings of sexual deviance as articulated by the discipline of sexology, I will explore the ways in which sexual (and implicitly gender) normalcy was constructed. Also, I hope to capture tensions between the categories of the normal and deviant and its presence and absence in Czechoslovak sexological discourse.

I ask the following questions: What kinds of sexual practices and gender identities did Czechoslovak sexology diagnose as pathological or deviant,² and what forms were deemed normal? How stable were the categories of normal and deviant? What deviant sexualities were rendered visible by sexological accounts? What was the supposed origin and genealogy of deviance? What was the role of the family in the genealogy and definition of deviance? What attributes were ascribed to deviants beside non-normative sexual practices? How was gender understood and connected with deviance? What was the extent of sexology’s disciplining drive? And to what extent did it allow for agency, reflexivity and change? These issues have remained unexplored, to the detriment of understanding the specificities of discursive constructions of gender and sexuality in the Eastern European context. My chapter thus attempts to redress Western-oriented scholarship and suggest possible queering moments in sexology, which is usually understood as a disciplining force. However, the normalising drive of sexology seems to be strengthened by the fact that the discipline analysed here operated under an authoritative regime.

Framing sexology

Western sociological research into sexology has shown the great extent to which sexuality is a product of sexological discourse (Weeks, 1985, 2003; Hall, 1995; Bland, 1995; Bland and Doane, 1998a/b; Duggan, 2000; Oosterhuis, 2000; Irvine, 2005; Marcus, 2007; Bauer, 2009). This stream of thinking follows Foucault’s analysis to explore the key concepts of disciplining, regulation and governmentality asserting itself via the proliferation of discourses on sex in the Western regime of scientia sexualis (Foucault, 1980) – which is in fact sexology and the neighbouring disciplines of forensic medicine and psychiatry.

My chapter is informed by a Foucauldian approach and by the work of Judith Butler. It is her focus on the axes of sex-gender-desire (Butler, 1990) that structures my analysis of sexological disquisitions written during the last two decades of state-socialist Czechoslovakia. Butler pointed out the quintessential connectedness of socially intelligible subjects, heterosexual men and women, with the heteronormative status quo based on the socially regulated family (i.e. Butler, 1997). Guided by her ‘question of how normative sexuality is reproduced to the queer question of how that very normativity is confounded by the non-normative sexualities’ (Butler, 1997: 272), I want to challenge the seamless equation between normal and heterosexual on the one hand, and non-normal and non-heterosexual on the other. I suggest that exploring deviant heterosexualities, as captured by the sexological pen, might bring new insights into the construction of sex-gender-desire and subvert an easy alliance between family-normal-heterosexual.

Sociologists and historians of sexuality tend to agree that sexology reasserted the modernist notion of difference defining people as varying in their anatomy, physiology and intellect (Oosterhuis, 2000) and linking this difference, as along with sexuality, to biological imperatives (Weeks, 2003). It was the Darwinian paradigm shift that ‘encouraged the search for the animal in man, and found it in his sex’ (Weeks, 2003: 43). The sexual and the biological were thus inextricably linked, finding their expression and codification in sexology. Contrary to this established understanding, I argue that the Czechoslovak sexology during normalisation identified social phenomena rather than biology as underpinning sexuality, especially in its deviant forms.

The discipline of sexology has constituted an unusually strong tradition in the Czechoslovak republic. The Sexological Institute has been an integral part of Charles University’s Medical School in Prague. It was founded as the first university-based sexological department in the world in 1921.³ Sexologist Raboch, however, claimed that the institute was founded after World War II ‘as a manifestation of the progressiveness of our socialist society’ (Raboch, 1977: 227). As much as the ‘true’ origins of the Sexological Institute are unclear, it seems that sexology during normalisation was reluctant to attribute its own genealogy to the democratic First Republic⁴ but rather professed itself a component of a communist system. This nevertheless attests to the willingness of the official discourse to include sexology in its tradition. As a result of the East/West divide after World War II, Czechoslovak sexology was to a large degree cut off from discussions and developments occurring within Western sexology and related disciplines. Up until the present, however, there is no analysis of its operation.

Sexology in Czechoslovakia did not vanish. Compared to other disciplines studying people, it even flourished. In my analysis, I will focus on scholarly presentations from annual Sexological society conferences and on transcripts of sexological scholarly gatherings from the normalisation period (1969–89). The chief reason for choosing these kinds of materials instead of books was their semi-official character. In the Janus-faced society of normalisation, where nearly everything and everyone had their ‘official’ non-contradictory side as well as the ‘unofficial’ one, I believe more candid insights and open discussions can be found in materials meant only for internal purposes. I unearthed these documents in the archive of the Sexological Institute in Prague. They are not available in libraries – not intended for the public eye they were published in small mimeograph prints of about 500 copies, typed on typewriters. These edited volumes (‘sborník’) published from 1978–87 (analysing ‘cases’ and ‘data’ since the early 1970s) consist of short conference papers given by sexologists as well as psychiatrists, psychologists and forensic scientists. Especially invaluable were the literal transcripts of discussions among presenters included in some of the volumes. Virtually all the authoritative figures speaking (and writing) during this period here are sexologists and psychologists who are still influential today – publishing medical textbooks and often quoted in the popular media.

These volumes cover a wide range of topics from fertility disorders and their cure, teenage sexuality, sex education, contraception and abortion, venereal diseases, victimology in case of sexual offences, orgasm in women, sexual performance disorders in men, to minority sexualities such as homosexuality, transsexualism, sexuality of the mentally ill and sexual pathology and deviance. I will focus on those papers discussing deviance in all its forms.⁵

To make sense of the written sexological texts, I will use the methods of discourse analysis. The discursive approach works on the assumption that language does not mirror some outside-existing reality but that it productively constitutes reality; a methodological approach in line with the poststructuralist theories of Foucault and Butler. Discursive methods focus on structures of meaning – the forms, orders and patterns – present in a text, to reveal meaning-making processes and offer rich interpretations (Jaworski and Coupland, 1999).

Understanding deviation and the norm

Sexology was founded in the nineteenth century as a medico-forensic science,⁶ and close cooperation between sexologists, forensic scientists, criminologists and psychiatrists was still visible at sexological conferences during the period analysed. Presenters often discussed deviance in terms of various sexual ‘state of facts’ that resulted in varying legal qualifications. Typically, sexual offences belonged to the category ‘against the dignity of man’ (Máthé, 1982: 39). However, other legal framings were used in communist law, ranging from infringement of personal liberty through disorderly conduct to disruption of socialist relations. Thus non-conforming sexual acts were deemed as aimed against individuals (and against oneself) sometimes the communist legal system identified them as directed against the whole of society.⁷

Sexologists during normalisation seemed to be aware of the social forces forming sexualities. The sexologist Kočiš in his paper ‘Evaluating sexual delinquents’ states that: ‘The perception of sexual delinquency is in every society burdened by a disorganised web of fixed and flexible attitudes, values and norms. The perpetrator of such criminal acts arouses different attitudes in society compared to perpetrators of other offences. Every sexual delinquent is understood as a manifestation of deep alienation from social norms’ (Kočiš, 1982: 15). Similarly the psychiatrists Molčan and Žucha claim ‘such manifestations are deviant which psychogeneity is almost exclusive’ (Molčan and Žucha, 1982: 395). These authors thus identify social, mostly changeable phenomena as constructing a sexually deviant act. Placing deviance fully in the social and mental realm contradicts the established sociological perception of sexology as deeply rooted in biology. Weeks in his analysis of sexology unequivocally claims that ‘sexual theorists adopt[ed] a firmly essentialist idea of sexuality’ (Weeks, 1985: 80) while ‘their achievement has been to naturalise sexual patterns and identities’ (ibid., italics in original).

The normative social fabric defining deviance is difficult to navigate, especially for the expert. As Kočiš explains: ‘On a daily basis while creating expertise, we get into situations when we have to – not only for ourselves but also for other experts – time and again define basic psychopathological terms, examine the concepts of psychopathological, psychiatric and sexological theories. […] Nowhere are the borders between health and illness, norm and abnormity so indistinct where the medical and especially social consequences of expert diagnosis so grave as in these cases’ (Kočiš, 1982: 16). Sexological evaluation is perceived as fluid, constantly (re)defining its own apparatus. These shifting grounds, though, have serious consequences for the diagnosed person. Often, Kočiš says, ‘the expertise reflects the ideology of the expert’ (Kočiš, 1982: 20) and is filled with prejudices, mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Queer Presences and Absences: An Introduction
• Part I Queer Movements, Marginalities and Mainstreams
• Part II ‘Queer Mediations and (Dis)Locations’
• Part III ‘Queer Presences and Absences: Everyday and Everywhere?’
• Index