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Sex and Socialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2013

DAN HEALEY
DAN HEALEY*
Affiliation:
The University of Reading, Whiteknights, PO Box 217, Reading, Berkshire, RG6 6AH; [email protected]
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Extract

Dagmar Herzog's Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History is an astonishingly rich synthesis for a work just short of 225 pages. Its vigorous narrative and energetic arguments never flag, and the wider contours of the continent's twentieth-century history are always in view. This is a book that has the lucidity, and the sophistication, to instruct students and tutors alike.

Type
Forum: Dagmar Herzog's Sexuality in Europe
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , May 2013 , pp. 289 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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References

1 For an argument that Stalinist sexual values were born as much from Soviet expert theories about gender difference as from Stalinist ‘conservatism’, see Healey, Dan, Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in Clinic and Courtroom, 1917–1939 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

2 See for instance Garton, Stephen, Histories of Sexuality: Antiquity to Sexual Revolution (London: Equinox, 2004)Google Scholar.

3 ‘Kollontai represented the West's worst nightmares about “Godless” communism undermining the foundations of Christian morality and the nuclear family’, Robb, George, ‘Marriage and Reproduction’, in Cocks, H. G. and Houlbrook, Matt, eds, Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 101Google Scholar.

4 For an attempt to contrast Stalin's, Hitler's and social-democratic Swedish approaches to ‘sex and the state in the 1930s’, see Clark, Anna, Desire: A History of European Sexuality (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 181–97Google Scholar. Robb, ‘Marriage’, 102, treats Stalinist natalism as identical to Fascist and Nazi variants; remarkably, his is the only essay in this collection on the ‘modern history of sexuality’ to mention any socialist regimes at all; the only other references to ‘socialism’ briefly refer to early nineteenth-century utopians of the Anglo-American world, see H. G. Cocks, ‘Religion and Spirituality’.

5 Socialism's story of course shifts eastward from Russia and on to the global South over the course of the twentieth century; see Priestland, David, The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2010), xxv–xxviiGoogle Scholar.

6 See e.g. the articles by Zimmerman, Susan, Huebner, Karla and Bibuyck, Erin K., under the general title ‘Gender, the Body, and Sexuality’, in Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women's and Gender History, 4 (2010)Google Scholar. Work by Drs Martin Putna, Jan Seidl and others on the cultural and historical dimensions of Czech homosexuality was showcased under the general title ‘Jiná laska: homosexualita jako kulturní fenomén (The other love: Homosexuality as a cultural phenomenon)’ in the national historical magazine of the Czech Republic, Dějeni a současnost, 12 (2007), and Putna and Seidl are editing a three-volume Czech-language series on same-sex love in Czech history and culture.