Politics and Pornography: Czech Performance in the International Arena

This essay examines the proliferation of all-male pornographic performances that have emerged from the Czech Republic subsequent to the Velvet Revolution of 1989—an event that toppled the communist-led government of Czechoslovakia and paved the way for market reforms and multi-party democracy in the current Czech Republic. Many theatre scholars may be aware of a longstanding dissident theatrical tradition linked to the Czech lands, a tradition exemplified by the plays of Vacláv Havel, who often used them to critique the abuses of the communist era. Yet in the years following the Velvet Revolution, performances exported from the Czech lands to the international arena have undergone a radical shift: rather than plays and productions that register dissent from the current status quo, international audiences can now access a wealth of pornographic productions from the Czech Republic that (on first glance, at least) support a global neoliberal ideology. This essay aims to not only track the social and political shifts that gave rise to a burgeoning all-male Czech pornography industry, but also to suggest ways that readers might rethink Czech pornography in order to reclaim the dissident status usually held by other genres of Czech performance.