Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945–1989 by Kateřina Lišková (review)

In this groundbreaking publication, Kateřina Lišková, an associate professor of sociology and gender studies at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, tells the story of sexual liberation in communist Czechoslovakia. She approaches the history of sexuality through the history of expertise. Following scholars such as Michel Foucault and Gil Eyal, she assumes that expert knowledge, in this case sexology, is instrumental to the construction of modern subjectivities, including those associated with sexuality.

Lišková’s analysis is based on her extensive archival research covering major sexological publications (both popular and professional), court files, letters sent to the press and various state agencies, and official governmental documents from the communist era. The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 gives an overview of gender and sexual politics in Central-Eastern Europe before and during communism to argue that sexuality was central to the socialist project. Chapter 2 discusses gender equality in the long 1950s and how this project was promoted by sexologists. Chapter 3 presents changes in sexological research on female orgasm (conducted in Czechoslovakia since the 1950s). Chapter 4 trains its focus on the backlash in equality politics during the 1970s and the role of experts in the rein-stallation of traditional ideas about the family. Finally, chapter 5 traces the surprisingly changing approaches toward so-called sexual deviance.

The book is rooted in both Czech and international feminist scholarship. It presents a detailed exploration of historical processes unknown to the wider academic public, placing them in the broader context of developments on both sides of the Iron Curtain and challenging numerous assumptions about the history of sexuality.

I have been following Lišková’s research since 2012. I was able to observe how she collects her materials and develops her argument in conference papers and journal articles. Yet the scope and depth of the book go far beyond earlier partial presentations. First, Lišková shows that early twentieth-century sexology developed not only in German-speaking Central Europe (Vienna and Berlin) and Great Britain but also in Prague. While the first sexological institute was established in Berlin by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1919, the Institute for the Study of Sexual Pathology in Prague was founded only two years later. Hirschfeld’s institute was private, and its story ends with it being burned down by the Nazis in 1933. In contrast, the Prague institute was a public, university-based institution that managed to survive, “function[ing] without interruption throughout the whole communist period” (14). Marriage and sex advice manuals authored by people associated with the Prague institute sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Second, Lišková challenges past accounts, like those of Nikolas Rose, by arguing that the crucial role of the so-called psy-ences (psychology, psychiatry, and so on) in “how we understand ourselves” (10) is not limited to Western liberal societies: “the psy-ence of sexology was present and indispensable for the Czechoslovak regime to navigate the people’s selves according to its own changing priorities” (10).

This argument leads us to the final, most important element of Lišková’s thesis, which breaks the widespread assumption about progress in the history of sexuality. Departing from Dagmar Herzog’s observation that current discourse around sexuality is dominated by “the liberalization paradigm,” or the assumption of “the gradual overcoming of obstacles to sexual freedom,” Lišková demonstrates that while experts promoted gender equality in marriage in the 1950s, discourse had shifted completely by the 1970s; sexologists began to argue that a successful marriage depends on a man’s domination over his wife.¹ After World War II, communists in Czechoslovakia introduced new laws that made marriage a union of equals. “With the legal framework changed, people were expected to change their attitudes to marriage as well. Sexologists wrote new marriage manuals which extolled the virtues of...