Agnieszka Kościańska - Böcker

Behind the Iron Curtain, the politics of sexuality and gender were, in many ways, more progressive than the West.While Polish citizens undoubtedly suffered under the oppressive totalitarianism of socialism, abortion was legal, clear laws protected victims of rape, and it was relatively easy to legally change one's gender. In Gender, Pleasure, and Violence, Agnieszka Kościańska reveals that sexologists—experts such as physicians, therapists, and educators—not only treated patients but also held sex education classes at school, published regular columns in the press, and authored highly popular sex manuals that sold millions of copies. Yet strict gender roles within the home meant that true equality was never fully within reach. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and archival work, Kościańska shares how professions like sexologists defined the notions of sexual pleasure and sexual violence under these sweeping cultural changes.By tracing the study of sexual human behavior as it was developed and professionalized in Poland since the 1960s, Gender, Pleasure, and Violence explores how the collapse of socialism brought both restrictions in gender rights and new opportunities.

Behind the Iron Curtain, the politics of sexuality and gender were, in many ways, more progressive than the West.While Polish citizens undoubtedly suffered under the oppressive totalitarianism of socialism, abortion was legal, clear laws protected victims of rape, and it was relatively easy to legally change one's gender. In Gender, Pleasure, and Violence, Agnieszka Kościańska reveals that sexologists—experts such as physicians, therapists, and educators—not only treated patients but also held sex education classes at school, published regular columns in the press, and authored highly popular sex manuals that sold millions of copies. Yet strict gender roles within the home meant that true equality was never fully within reach. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and archival work, Kościańska shares how professions like sexologists defined the notions of sexual pleasure and sexual violence under these sweeping cultural changes.By tracing the study of sexual human behavior as it was developed and professionalized in Poland since the 1960s, Gender, Pleasure, and Violence explores how the collapse of socialism brought both restrictions in gender rights and new opportunities.

This handbook provides an overview of scholarly research on sexuality in East Central Europe for both students and academics, focusing on the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, from the late nineteenth century to the present.The collection is organized into eight sections covering major areas of research including non-normative sexualities; family, marriage, and kinship; race/ethnicity and nationalism; birth, health, and reproduction; religion; sex, work, and mobility; violence; and sex education. The chapters highlight the breadth and depth of current scholarship on the region, past and present. The contributions present cutting-edge research treating each of the East Central European countries on its own terms and contextualizing sexual meanings, practices, and dynamics in relation to the specific ways they have been shaped, experienced, represented, and contested in the lives of people across these territories. In doing so, the book underscores the differences in the region’s trajectories of sexuality and sexual politics from those of not only the West but also Russia/USSR and (former) Yugoslavia across the long twentieth century.Written by a multidisciplinary team of international experts, The Routledge Handbook of Sexuality in East Central Europe is an ideal resource for scholars of European history, gender studies, anthropology, and sociology.Chapter 21 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA) 4.0 license.