Gender, Pleasure, and Violence

Agnieszka Kościańska is Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw. She is author and co-editor of several volumes on gender and sexuality, including (in Polish) The Power of Silence: Gender and Religious Conversion.

In highlighting the patient-centric and holistic approaches that Polish sexology developed in the 1970s and 1980s the book offers an important counternarrative to the presumed historical superiority of Western sexological approaches and more generally a rebuttal of Western representations of state socialism as a non-modern and static system. . . . Capturing the complexities of sexologists and sexological discourses under state-socialism aside, the book is particularly insightful in discussing continuities and changes within sexological approaches to sex and sexuality since 1989.- Anita Kurimay (Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe) Kościańska's book is an outstanding example of how to popularize Poland's cultural history and can help readers from a non-(post)socialist background to understand the significance of research done behind the Iron Curtain. For decades, it has been an unquestioned primacy of the West to judge whether post-socialist countries have either failed or succeeded in their transformation – i.e. in terms of culture. Kościańska opposes this self-assumed entitlement of the West by presenting not only a strong, but also a highly nuanced Polish point of view. In doing so, her book is a substantial contribution to overcome orientalization of Central European history and sciences.- Elisa-Maria Hiemer (H / SOZ / KULT) Gender, Pleasure, and Violence presents a complex and fascinating picture of Polish sexology in the twentieth century. The author's detailed research and nuanced analysis renders palpable the robustness of the community of experts and their output, showing that sexuality was a topic of sustained interest in the medical community. The author sees many Polish sexologists as global pioneers in their approach, which combined psychological and cultural elements earlier than many US counterparts. Embracing a sex-positive perspective early on, Polish sexologists provided both expertise and educational materials for wider consumption that depicted sexual pleasure as a natural component of our humanity, which needed to be understood, nurtured, and valued.- Maria Bucur (Aspasia) Gender, Pleasure, and Violence offers an interesting mixture of history, anthropology, and ethnography, which is strongly grounded in both the local and the international context. It offers insightful discussions and arguments that can be interesting for scholars and students of various disciplines, from history through anthropology and political science.- Anna Muller (The Polish Review) Gender, Pleasure, and Violence is an absorbing and powerful history of sexual science and its application, of persistence and transformations, of unobvious chronologies and, perhaps most importantly, of the sexual agency of experts and the people who sought and continue to seek their advice.- Agata Ignaciuk (European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health) Overall, Kościańska's book makes three crucial contributions. First, it challenges scholarly bias in the research on the history of sexology, which has marginalized and/or mischaracterized state-socialist sexology. Second, it reveals the complex mechanisms involved in the construction of gendered discourses, in this case in the expert realm, which is an important contribution to the gender history of state socialism in Poland. Third, the book adds much to our understanding of the effects of the post-1989 political transformations on Polish women's lives. This makes the publication of high interest for scholars working on state socialism and post-socialism, as well as for historians of sexology and feminism.- Natalia Jarska - Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences (H-Net: Humanities and Social Science)

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I: Sexology and Society1. The Development of Sexology and Sexual Rights Activism in Europe and North America2. The Polish School of SexologyPart II. Pleasure: Towards Good Sex3. Sexuality and Scientific Knowledge4. "Civilized" Sex and Gender Relations under Socialism5. Gender and Pleasure in Expert Discourse TodayPart III. Violence: Expert Discourse of Rape6. Rape: Definitions, Legal Understanding and Statistics7. The Provocative Victim and the Male Limits of Self-Restraint: Stereotypes in Expert Literature8. In the Court Room9. Feminism: Changes in Expert Discourse and in the Court RoomConclusionsWorks CitedIndex