Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures through an East-West Gaze

13: "Don't Get Pricked!": Representation and the Politics of Sexuality in the Czech Republic

251 thirteen ‘‘Don’t Get Pricked!’’ Representation and the Politics of Sexuality in the Czech Republic Věra Sokolová Why Sexuality? Many Czech social scientists know something about the changing ways male and female sexualities have been understood and represented in Czech society in the post-1989 period, but hardly anyone has written about them.1 This is all the more striking since sexuality is embedded in and influences other social, political, and economic trends, such as changes in political rhetoric , cultural values, and lifestyle choices, and can thus be a fundamental lens through which to interpret and assess the broad processes of social change that have taken place in post-communist Central Europe. The following chapter will attempt to fill in this gap in scholarship, analyzing representations of sexuality in the Czech media, developments in traffic in women, and the new political discourse on homosexuality in the Czech Republic as both integral to and functions of the democratic and economic transition. By doing so, I show how studies of gender politics in Central Europe can incorporate sexuality to gain insight into a wide range of social problems that at first glance seems far removed from questions of gender. It is not surprising that much of the scholarship on the economic and democratic transition after 1989 has focused on an important but restrictive set of themes—such as changes in political culture, the development of civil Věra Sokolová 252 society, and privatization and the transformation of state institutions—that seek to measure or account for the various degrees of ‘‘success’’ or ‘‘failure’’ of Central and Eastern European countries in their reform policies.2 Though these analyses have enjoyed a certain degree of primacy, they have not gone unchallenged by feminist and other writings that highlight the sometimes negative cultural consequences of policies and reforms deemed economically and democratically beneficial. These feminist scholars from both ‘‘East’’ and ‘‘West’’ consider the central role of gender in the transition process and they use a comparative history approach to understand the differences in women’s experiences in the divided Europe.3 This scholarship has been far from uncontentious . Feminists from both sides of the Iron Curtain bring different lived experiences to their work, and they also often use different theoretical approaches and empirical data. It is no surprise that by the mid-1990s their scholarship had led to sharp differences in interpretation, fueling explosive debates and disagreements about women and feminisms ‘‘East and West.’’4 Thus, although they demonstrate the need to include gender analysis within the broader transition literature, these debates have also proved the need to bridge the perceived ‘‘Eastern’’ and ‘‘Western’’ experiential and theoretical gaps and tensions that characterized the feminist writings of the early 1990s in order to produce mutually acceptable and enriching frameworks of interpretation and challenge the structuralist mode of thought that is still prevalent in comparative writing on gender and sexuality in post-communist East Central Europe. Despite these differences, feminist scholarship on post-communist East Central Europe has shared common ground by making the labor market, women in the political process, and, above all, reproductive politics the center of analysis. This is in part because feminist scholars have for some time challenged the notion of separate public and private spheres and have rightly pointed out that reproduction is by no means a private domain removed from the influences of ‘‘high’’ politics.5 As Gail Kligman noted in her eye-opening study of the politics of reproduction in socialist Romania, critical inquiry into the institutionalization of social practices under communism enables us to ‘‘comprehend more fully the lived processes of social atomization and dehumanization ’’ of totalitarian regimes and to understand ‘‘the means by which reproductive issues become embedded in social-political agendas’’ on both national and international levels.6 ‘‘The politics of reproduction’’ analyzed by Kligman and others includes debates about abortion, child care, the use of sterilization under communism, pronatalist policies as tools for nationbuilding , and other political uses of ideas of family, motherhood, and womanhood . Because gender discrimination in laws is often couched in legal language , these scholars also address the rhetoric and argumentation used to institute laws regulating family and social relations. Reproductive politics, therefore, offers a way to understand how the entire political field affects the way ordinary people plan and live their private lives. ‘‘Don’t Get Pricked!’’ 253 However, reproductive politics is only one...