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Queer Encounters with Communist Power: Non-Heterosexual Lives and the State in Czechoslovakia, 1948-1989
This interdisciplinary lecture series brings together historical and contemporary research perspectives and engages with the question how gender and sexuality are negotiated in the (former) state socialist countries of Europe.
Věra Sokolová (Ass. Professor of History and Head of the Graduate Program in Gender Studies, Charles University, Czech Repl.)


Libora Oates-Indruchová (Professor of Sociology of Gender, University of Graz Austria)


NOTE: Timezone for the lctures is in C.T

In this lecture series historians, sociologists, cultural scholars and activists will address the question of what the specific contributions to gender equality or gender and sexual emancipation were in the communist countries of Europe (Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Ukrainian SSR, Polish People's Republic and SFR Yugoslavia) and Central Asia, and what has lingering effects today.

After all, communism had taken up the banner of equal rights for women. Today, by contrast, so-called “Eastern Europe” tends to be associated with conservative, anti-LGBTQ* or anti-gender equality policies in light of legislative changes such as the restriction of abortion rights in Poland or the curtailment of freedoms and rights of non-heterosexual people in Russia; or it is claimed that there never was a sexual revolution or genuine grassroots feminism under state socialism in the first place and that gender equality is a “Western import”.

More recently shifts and reframing’s of East-West differences could also be observed in the context of the Russian invasion into Ukraine.

In the lecture series we will complicate homogenizing regional framings and explore how European East-West differences are created and justified. We also attempt to discuss whether it is at all valid to speak of “Eastern” or “Western European” ideas, problems and developments, or whether for example a translocal, transregional European, global perspective is necessary with regards to the many of the aforementioned topics.

The lecture series is hosted by the Chair of European Studies in cooperation with the Viadrina Institute for European Studies (IFES) and WIDE+
Submitted by: NIKK
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23.01.2023 18:00-20:00
Lecture
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