Sexuality in communist Czechoslovakia was to a large extent informed by an expert discourse of sexology. Analyzing sexual advice books published by sexologists for the general public in the 1950s and 1970s, I show that sexual discourses were formed in a reversed order of liberalization vs. conservatism as compared to the West. While writing on sex in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s stressed gender equality and emancipation of women, the texts published in the 1970s insisted on the necessity of gender hierarchy for a successful marriage and defended privatized families isolated from larger society. I link these shifts to the changing character of the regime which moved from accentuating public, work and equality in the 1950s to emphasizing private, family and authority in the 1970s. In my analysis, I use the concepts of psy-ences (Rose, 1992, 1996) and intimacy at the intersection of the public/private divide (Berlant and Warner, 1998), while also accounting for their blind spots. Where Rose insists that psy-ences have operated exclusively in modern liberal capitalist societies, I argue that a psy-ence of sexology also co-constituted social life under state socialism. My article analyzes Czechoslovak sexual and gender trajectories and accounts for differences from and convergences with 20th-century western histories of sexuality. I critically examine Czechoslovak sexological discourses in their changing historical settings to show that there was not one ‘communist period,’ even in one country. Rather, there existed varying modes of framing sexuality at different times.

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Despite its historical focus on aberrant behavior, sexology barely dealt with sexual deviants in 1950s Czechoslovakia. Rather, sexologists treated only isolated instances of deviance. The rare cases that went to court appeared mostly because they hindered work or harmed the national economy. Two decades later, however, the situation was markedly different. Hundreds of men were labeled as sexual delinquents and sentenced for treatment in special sexological wards at psychiatric hospitals. They endangered society, so it was claimed, by being unwilling or unable to conform to the family norm. The mode of subjection shifted from work to family. I analyse this change by using the tools of Gil Eyal’s sociology of expertise (2013), which focuses on shifts in institutional matrices that bring forth new groups of agents creating new expert networks. I argue that sexology became profoundly institutionalized in the early 1970s, which brought the discipline closer to psychiatry and forensic science. New inpatient facilities were opened that could admit sentenced sexual deviants. Also, demographic changes accelerated in the 1960s, especially skyrocketing divorce rates and plummeting birth rates, which made it imperative for the government to focus on cementing the family. After the failed attempts of the Prague Spring in 1968, the new pro-Soviet government of communist Czechoslovakia did just that. During the time dubbed as ‘normalization’ by the new elites, anyone who strayed from the family norm was suspected of deviance.

My paper is an analysis of contemporary Czech expert discourses on love and coupledom, framed within ongoing feminist discussions of sociological theory's emphasis on the individualization, refl exivity and detraditionalization of gender. Using Bourdieu's notion of symbolic violence, I argue for understanding therapeutic discourses as perlocutionary speech acts that authoritatively enact gendered norms and heteronormative assumptions. This performative approach both challenges heightened refl exivity theory by pointing to its fl awed voluntarism, and also allows for grasping transformation through fi ssures between a perlocutionary act and its reception.

Specific developments in reproductive health occurred in Eastern Europe, especially in the second half of the twentieth century. During state socialism, it was experts, not social movements, who furthered the agenda of women’s health and sexuality. New analyses from the region and written mostly by authors who speak the local languages attest to the wealth of histories, highlighting different timelines of reproductive health developments, the unexpected causes behind them, and the social actors and institutions which played decisive roles.