Liberty, Love

The Historical Journal, 2021

In this article, I discuss the emancipation of masturbation in twentieth-century Hungary, focusing on the socialist, Kádár era (late s to late s), which I claim was the time when the discourses concerning masturbation underwent profound transformation. I use Thomas Laqueur's periodization of discourses on masturbation in the West and make the case that in Hungary, due to its twentieth-century political and intellectual history, which affected both the institutionalization of sexology and discourses on sexuality, there is a markedly different chronology. In Hungary, interwar socialists were the first to suggest a new approach toward masturbation but these ideas remained marginal during the Horthy regime and in the 'Stalinist' s. In the early years of the Kádár regime, debates about sexual morality reformulated what should be understood under socialist sexual morality. The concept of socialist humanism, especially Imre Hirschler's work, linked early s sex education with the interwar socialist discourse on sex and paved the way to the emancipation of masturbation and the establishment of a post-Stalinist, socialist sexual ethics. In the s and s, iconic sexologists like Vilmos Szilágyi and Béla Buda moved away from socialist humanism and continued Hirschler's work, but mirroring the perspectives of contemporary Western science.

European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire 22(1):161-175, 2015

This article discusses how gender and (homo)sexual relations were disciplined in Hungary during the 1970s, part of the Kádár era, named after János Kádár, the top political leader of the People's Republic of Hungary between 1956 and 1988. The first part of the article examines the widespread effects of the New Economic Mechanism of 1968 (which could not be rounded off by political reform) on critical thoughts on family formation, as well as some largely absent aspects of gender equality. The second part of the article presents pieces of empirical evidence on the social existence of sexuality in the context of a system of 'tolerant repression' celebrating asexual socialist reproduction. The article concludes that most Hungarians seemed to be able to negotiate their lives between the constraints of state socialism and their longing for enjoyable human relationships even in the 'uniformly pallid' 1970s.

Aspasia, 2010

The Hungarian government has received international criticism over a new law that bans the depiction or promotion of homosexuality to those under the age of 18. Andrea Pető argues that the law may well prove to be a miscalculation by the country’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán. ‘Will to power’ is the key concept when one wants to decipher the long rule of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his policies. Nowhere are the conscious incoherence and confusion in the values of Orbán more apparent than in the latest Act LXXIX of 2021 on ‘stricter measures against paedophile offenders’, which labels gender identity, gender reassignment, and homosexuality as ‘deviations’. The law, which was formulated with no public consultation, was passed with the now usual speed.

2010

Communist regimes considered pornography to be an exclusively ‘Western’ phenomenon and interpreted it as a sign of moral decay caused by the capitalist mode of production. Yet if we broaden the notion of pornography to include “soft” or “modest” erotica, then we have to acknowledge the existence of numerous pornographic images on the pages of various socialist magazines, daily newspapers and current affairs journals. This paper examines the phenomenon of socialist erotica in the context of socialist Yugoslavia. It starts by providing a general overview of various Yugoslav periodical publications containing pornographic and nude images, and outlines some of the key traits of official cultural policies and attitudes related to such publications. This is followed by a close examination of Start magazine, published from 1969 until 1991 in Zagreb, and widely acclaimed among the Yugoslav intellectual elite for its sharp criticism of political and social affairs. Start was the first Yugosl...

Interlitteraria

The aim of this paper is to closely follow the dynamics of concepts such as shame or pornography as seen throughout the lens of East-European (post-World War II) literature focusing only on the books that had the power and courage to change the perspective or the whole definition(s) of this terms. Moreover, I want to show if/how the Communist Regime changed the perception, the mentality or, with Pierre Bourdieu’s term, habitus of some countries and if/how is the change reflected in literature focusing my research mostly on Romanian, (but also Polish and Hungarian) prose which means I will also try and understand and explain the dynamics of another concept – censorship. What did censorship meant before, how was it seen after the Regime was installed – from a writer’s point of view, of course – and, more important, how people’s perspective(s) were changed regarding subjects such as intimacy, sexuality and literature.

The Russian Review, 2010

Russi a's transition from a closed society under Communist rule to an open one under President Boris Yeltsin was marked by a rupture with the sexual values of the Soviet era. Those "traditional" Soviet values included a relative, but never absolute, silence about sex. Beginning in the late 1980s the last Communist leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, opened the floodgates to debate about sex with his policies of perestroika and glasnost. Russia experienced a belated discursive "sexual revolution" that accompanied the democratic wave of the late 1980s and early 1990s. That revolution gathered more speed when Communism collapsed in 1991, and Russia began a dash to capitalism. Debates raged in the Russian media over sex education in schools, family planning clinics funded by Westerners, the rise of AIDS and the need for safer sex, and the sexualization of television and cinema. Meanwhile, the state made basic reforms to sexual regulation. Homosexuality between men, banned by Joseph Stalin in 1934, was decriminalized in 1993, and a new criminal code enacted in 1997 redefined rape and the age of consent. 1 After 2000, conservative-nationalist critics, long upset by these trends but emboldened by the presidency of Vladimir Putin, denounced this sexual revolution. In the troubling context of cultural globalization, with its appeals to individuals across and beyond national borders, conservative-nationalists saw the nation and state as threatened from a hypersexualized marketplace and its new conduit, the internet. 2 Sexual values became a I am grateful to the Centre for East European Language Based Area Studies (UK), which prompted me to write this paper for its 2008 "Doing Culture" conference at Sheffield University; and to the History and English departments of Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia, who sponsored the paper's presentation in Vancouver. Audiences at Columbia and Cambridge Universities also gave me lively feedback, as did Richard Taylor, Wendy Bracewell, and the Russian Review's two anonymous peer reviewers. I also thank Brian Pronger, who showed me that porn studies could be serious work. 1 For summaries of these developments see

Journal of Homosexuality, 2017

This comparative social-historical study examines different versions of state-socialist body politics manifested in Hungary and Slovenia mainly during the 1950s by using archive material of “unnatural fornication” court cases. By analyzing the available Hungarian “természet elleni fajtalanság” and Slovenian “nenaravno občevanje” court cases, we can shed light on how the defendants were treated by the police and the judiciary. On the basis of these archive data that have never been examined before from these angles, we can construct an at least partial picture of the practices and consequences of state surveillance of same-sex-attracted men during state-socialism. The article explores the functioning of state-socialist social control mechanisms directed at nonnormative sexualities that had long-lasting consequences on the social representation of homosexuality in both countries.

Contemporary European History

This paper is about a remarkable file, ‘Interviews with Homosexuals’, in the bequest of László Cseh-Szombathy (1925–2007), who was internationally renowned and one of Hungary's most celebrated sociologists. Looking at the ways in which the interviews and the conceptual framework of the questions asked by Cseh-Szombathy were crafted, along with the interviewees’ answers to those questions, the article investigates the interaction of sexual experts and male homosexuals in late socialist-state Hungary. The author contends that, at the same time as sexual experts had historically fuelled and contributed to homophobia, sexual experts during late state-socialism also became the primary agents who started to speak out against the pathologisation of homosexuality and played a crucial role in facilitating homosexual men's exploration of sexual identity and self-acceptance. The paper highlights how Hungarian sexological experts engaged in productive dialogue with their patients and in...

The Double Entendre of Sex: Pornographies of Body and Society in Péter Esterházy's Fiction, 2019

Informed by feminist theory on the one hand and thematic and rhetorical criticism on the other, this article examines the components of discourse in two books by Péter Esterházy that share an emphatic attention to sexuality. The author interprets Esterházy's discourse of sex as grounded in the figure of the double entendre, with a different function in each work. In Kis magyar pornográfia ['A Little Hungarian Pornography'], vulgar corporeality and communist politics are shown as commensurate; both have a double meaning, with sex and politics referring both to themselves and to each other. In using one discourse as a cover for another, Esterházy continues the Central European Witz ['joke'] tradition, giving a particular twist to it by making the transference of meaning two-directional, thereby assigning double meanings to sex and politics alike. In Egy nő ['She Loves Me'], Esterházy attaches a double meaning to sex in a different manner; here sex is not a cover for something else but is shown to be reduced to itself, with a double meaning attached to its internal power relations. Sex is presented as a power game, in which man is repulsed by women yet is hopelessly attracted to them. Moreover, sex acts as the only tellable story taking the place of the untellable story of love. In this piece of postmodern fiction, the multiple perspectives bring about an interpretational uncertainty on the part of the reader as to whether sexist discourse is legitimized or subverted, and whether this legitimization and/or subversion is carried out by the narrator and/or by the implied author.