2020

rozdział w monografii naukowej

angielski

EN The argument presented in this paper is situated within the current debates on the history of women’s and sexual minorities’ organizing under state socialism (Fidelis 2007, Ghodsee 2012, Grabowska 2012, Mizielińska and Kulpa 2011). They show that concepts of political agency dominant in Western sociology are restricted by their geographical focus and that they universalize local histories and political strategies by projecting them onto Central and Eastern European contexts. It is instead postulated that researchers abandon the dominant dichotomies that organize a large part of sociological and anthropological work on state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe—the state vs civil society, structure vs. agency, Western timelines of progress and emancipation vs. social stagnation and political oppression under state-socialism—to see what kinds of agency were actually afforded to women and sexual minorities under state socialism and to what ends they were used. This chapter undertakes this task by challenging one of the dichotomies that organize research on LGBTQ history in the West, namely that between medicalization and emancipation. I argue that in analyzing the sociopolitical context of LGBTQ existence under state socialism this dichotomy does not hold, as sexology was one of the social fields in which various ideas of social emancipation were invented and tested. I analyze Polish sexological literature on transsexualism and transvestism to trace the ways in which sexological concepts were intricately bound with sociological diagnoses and served the purpose of changing social attitudes towards trans* persons and grant them political recognition. I then situate these findings in the context of the particular apparatus of knowledge production that was Polish sexology at the time (see Kościańska 2012, 2016) and in the context of state socialism as a project of alternative modernity.

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https://www.routledge.com/Queers-in-State-Socialism-Cruising-1970s-Poland/Basiuk-Burszta/p/book/9780367563349

Queers in State Socialism. Cruising 1970s Poland

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