Sexuality devolved rather than evolved in Czechoslovakia. Contrary to the commonly accepted narratives of sexual liberation proliferated in the West, the case of Czechoslovakia shows histories of sexuality as more complex and diverse. In the early years of communism building in the 1950s, sex was discussed in terms of love within an egalitarian marriage. Women were equal to men not only at work and in front of the law but also in expert discussions of sexuality and marriage. In the late stages of socialism, from the 1970s onwards, marriage got divorced from the public realm of work and was reformulated as based in hierarchical gender differences. Sex started to be suspect of deviance (in men) or prone to failure (in couples). Therapeutic approaches became the order of the day as sexually dysfunctional couples became treated in new marriage counseling centers or in-patient facilities. Therapy became widely used for the newly emerging segment of the population, sexually deviant men. Those men who could not or did not live up to the family norm and engaged in aberrant practices were often placed in sexological wards of psychiatric hospitals that commenced in the 1970s.

The history of sexuality in Czechoslovakia in the second half of the 20th century was to a large extent created by a group of doctors centered at the Sexological Institute in Prague. The Institute was founded as the first university-based center of its kind in the world in 1921, only two years after the private Hirschfeld´s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin. The Prague Institute resumed operations after the war and grouped a tightly knit circle of doctors who called themselves sexologists and who worked together for decades. Coming from various medical backgrounds, these doctors engaged in research and clinical practice, authored marriage manuals and devised sex treatments, in connection with other medical experts, forensic scientists and governmental policy makers. The discipline of sexology got institutionalized over time and branched mostly towards psychiatry. Czechoslovak sexology and its ideas of sex, gender and family retreated from utopian and egalitarian beginnings towards pragmatic and hierarchical later stages of real-socialism.

Based on the original research of archival sources, such as articles in medical press, conference proceedings, marriage manuals, radio shows and TV programs created by sexologists, my project charts an untraveled territory of histories of sexuality and gender in the Eastern bloc. It also speaks to the histories of psy-ences, the sciences of the mind that have shaped who we understand ourselves to be as people and how our selves are navigated in modern societies.

Kateřina Lišková, PhD is Assistant Professor in gender and sociology at Masaryk University. Last academic year, she was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University where she conducted her research on sexology and sexuality in communist Czechoslovakia, supported by the Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship - European Commission Seventh Framework Programme. Her research is focused on gender, sexuality, and the social organization of intimacy, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. In the past, she was affiliated with the New School for Social Research as a Fulbright Scholar and as a Visiting Scholar with New York University. She has lectured at various U.S. universities and her papers have appeared in several monographs published by Routledge, SAGE, Blackwell and Palgrave. In the Czech Republic, her book Good Girls Look the Other Way, Feminism and Pornography was published by Sociological Publishing House (2009).