Kateřina Lišková
Biographic Data
| ID | 171319 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kateřina Lišková |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kateřina |
| FAMILY NAME | Lišková |
| SIGNATURE | LIŠKOVÁ K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Masaryk University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3753-3372 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 31 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Dark Corners”
In 1966, the sexual murder of an eleven-year-old in Prague occupied the media and broader public, reinforcing expert debates about child sex offenders. In this article, we trace changes in medical experts’ understanding of child sex offenders in socialist Czechoslovakia between the late 1950s and mid-1970s. We show that psychiatrists and sexologists discussed forensic evaluation and the need for specialized treatment years before the 1966 case, b…
Sexual Knowledge and Expertise in Europe's East
East Central Europe played a crucial role in shaping the development of sexual science from the 1870s onwards. The life-histories of influential and well-known figures such as Sigmund Freud (born in Freiberg/Příbor), Magnus Hirschfeld (born in Kolberg/Kolobrzeg) and Karl Maria Kertbeny (born in Vienna, based in Budapest) reveal the imperial interconnectedness of East Central Europe with what would become Western Europe. By 1932, when the World Le…
Turning points in socialist medicine
Socialist states aspired to create modern, egalitarian societies with healthy citizens. Over the four decades of state socialism, experts debated whether premature children could achieve normal long-term mental development and full societal integration. This article analyses expertise networks to comparatively explore medical discussions regarding premature infants’ long-term development in Hungary, Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia. We exa…
Saving newborns, defining livebirth
After World War II, infant mortality rates started dropping steeply. We show how this was accomplished in socialist countries in East-Central Europe. Focusing on the two postwar decades, we explore comparatively how medical experts in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany saved fragile newborns. Based on an analysis of medical journals, we argue that the Soviet Union and its medical practices had only a marginal influence; the four co…
Early state socialism and eugenics
The article discusses the immediate post-war persistence and subsequent rejection of eugenics in East-Central European socialist states, exploring the case of premarital medical certificates. Building our analysis on published and archival sources, we show that immediately after the war, policies formulated at the governmental level were informed by eugenic ideas in medical expertise. Premarital medical certificates were aimed at combatting conta…
Sex in the Cold War
Surprisingly, sexuality has not been at the centre of scholarship on post-war Central and Eastern Europe. While neighbouring topics, such as gender or everyday life, have been thoroughly and wonderfully researched (the list here is too long, but let me mention at least some shining examples), sexuality somehow escaped the spotlight. Path-breaking research done by Dagmar Herzog on East Germany or Dan Healey on Soviet Russia was for a long time not…
Sex and gender norms in marriage
First, we argue that sexuality was central to socialist modernization: Sex and gender were reformulated whenever the socialist project was being revised. Expertise was crucial in these reformulations, which harnessed people's support for the changing regimes. Moreover, the role of the expert in society grew over time, leading to ever expanding and diversified fields of expertise. Second, gender and sexuality stood disjointed in these changes. Whe…
Aging women as sexual beings. Expertise between the 1950s and 1970s in state socialist Czechoslovakia
The paper examines the changes during state socialism in Czechoslovakia in the understanding of the post-reproductive sexuality of women, focusing on the network of medical experts and shifts in expertise, which gave rise to a ‘new kind of person’: sexually active climacteric women. Analyzing the medical press, we show how Czechoslovak experts moved from an exclusive focus on women of reproductive age toward seeing climacteric women first in conn…
From class origins to individual psychopathology
Over the course of 40 years of state socialism, the explanation that Czechoslovak criminologists gave for spousal murder changed significantly. Initially attributing offences to the perpetrator's class origins, remnants of his bourgeois way of life, and the lack of positive influence from the collective in the long 1950s, criminologists then refocused their attention solely on the individual's psychopathology during the period known as ‘Normaliza…
Since they are here in Czechia, they should talk in Czech’. Ethnicity in peer groups at school
Classrooms in Czechia are changing. What used to be a relatively ethnically homogeneous environment changed after 1989 and became much more diverse. How are children, both of Czech, as well as migrant origin, coping? What strategies do they use to negotiate their everyday lives in the classroom? We conducted an ethnographic study in two classes of one multicultural Czech elementary school and used an inductive analytical strategy. While the fifth…
M uriel B laive , editor. Perceptions of Society in Communist Europe
The fact that the Cold War did not make Eastern European countries into omnipotent states that suppressed a withering society has already been established. Narratives of an evil party-state versus heroic individuals have proven untenable, and Perceptions of Society in Communist Europe: Regime Archives and Popular Opinion, edited by Muriel Blaive, contributes a welcome approach to this topic that depicts the communist state itself as a layered, of…
Sexuality and gender in school-based sex education in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland in the 1970s and 1980s
Was there a state-socialist model of school sex education and if so, what characterized its form and content? What shaped the specificities and divergent characteristics of each country? The paper explores and compares programs of ‘education for family life’ as these became part of state-driven reproductive politics in late stages of state socialism in three countries (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary), with a particular focus on sexuality and gen…
Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style
This is the first account of sexual liberation in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Kateřina Lišková reveals how, in the case of Czechoslovakia, important aspects of sexuality were already liberated during the 1950s - abortion was legalized, homosexuality decriminalized, the female orgasm came into experts' focus - and all that was underscored by an emphasis on gender equality. However, with the coming of Normalization, gender discourses revers…
Sex under socialism
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 publish…
Now you see them, now you don’t’. Sexual deviants and sexological expertise in communist Czechoslovakia
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 s…
Bumbling idiots or evil masterminds? Challenging cold war stereotypes about women, sexuality and state socialism
In academic writing, facts about the past generally require the citation of relevant sources unless the fact or idea is considered ?common knowledge:? bits of information or dates upon which there is a wide scholarly consensus. This brief article reflects on the use of ?common knowledge? claims in contemporary scholarship about women, families, and sexuality as experienced during 20th century, East European, state socialist regimes. We focus on s…
We treat them all the same, but…’. Disappearing ethnic homogeneity in Czech classrooms and teachers’ responses
This article argues that the Czech education system is structured to operate in an ethnically homogeneous society. Although the Czech Republic is becoming increasingly heterogeneous, teachers deploy discursive practices of ‛sameness despite difference’ that obscure such growing diversity. This article is grounded in the historical context of migration to and from the Czech Republic and based on ethnographic research in several ethnically-mixed cl…
The Demise of Tradition and Its Salvation through Sex
In 2010 sex education became a surprising target of criticism in the secular Czech Republic. The voices of social conservatives were raised and were answered by the Minister of Education, who launched a reform of educational curricula to exclude sex education. This article analyses the discursive strategies employed by conservative opponents of sex education and highlights the interpretive repertoires of sexuality and gender. The authors argue th…
Released from Gender? Reflexivity, Performativity, and Therapeutic Discourses
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, reflexivity 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 perform…
Genderové aspekty českého školství [Gender Aspects of Czech Education]
Numerous Czech studies have been conducted on how the education system reproduces inequalities. While most of them have dealt with the reproduction of class inequalities, relatively few have focused on the reproduction of gender inequalities. In this article, the authors apply a conceptual understanding of the category of gender to research on education, an approach that avoids both universalising the category of woman, as well as the opposite ex…
Bumbling idiots or evil masterminds? Challenging cold war stereotypes about women, sexuality and state socialism
In academic writing, facts about the past generally require the citation of relevant sources unless the fact or idea is considered ?common knowledge:? bits of information or dates upon which there is a wide scholarly consensus. This brief article reflects on the use of ?common knowledge? claims in contemporary scholarship about women, families, and sexuality as experienced during 20th century, East European, state socialist regimes. We focus on s…
Now you see them, now you don’t’. Sexual deviants and sexological expertise in communist Czechoslovakia
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 s…
Sexuality and gender in school-based sex education in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland in the 1970s and 1980s
Was there a state-socialist model of school sex education and if so, what characterized its form and content? What shaped the specificities and divergent characteristics of each country? The paper explores and compares programs of ‘education for family life’ as these became part of state-driven reproductive politics in late stages of state socialism in three countries (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary), with a particular focus on sexuality and gen…
Sex and gender norms in marriage
First, we argue that sexuality was central to socialist modernization: Sex and gender were reformulated whenever the socialist project was being revised. Expertise was crucial in these reformulations, which harnessed people's support for the changing regimes. Moreover, the role of the expert in society grew over time, leading to ever expanding and diversified fields of expertise. Second, gender and sexuality stood disjointed in these changes. Whe…
Aging women as sexual beings. Expertise between the 1950s and 1970s in state socialist Czechoslovakia
The paper examines the changes during state socialism in Czechoslovakia in the understanding of the post-reproductive sexuality of women, focusing on the network of medical experts and shifts in expertise, which gave rise to a ‘new kind of person’: sexually active climacteric women. Analyzing the medical press, we show how Czechoslovak experts moved from an exclusive focus on women of reproductive age toward seeing climacteric women first in conn…
Genderové aspekty českého školství [Gender Aspects of Czech Education]
Numerous Czech studies have been conducted on how the education system reproduces inequalities. While most of them have dealt with the reproduction of class inequalities, relatively few have focused on the reproduction of gender inequalities. In this article, the authors apply a conceptual understanding of the category of gender to research on education, an approach that avoids both universalising the category of woman, as well as the opposite ex…
The Demise of Tradition and Its Salvation through Sex
In 2010 sex education became a surprising target of criticism in the secular Czech Republic. The voices of social conservatives were raised and were answered by the Minister of Education, who launched a reform of educational curricula to exclude sex education. This article analyses the discursive strategies employed by conservative opponents of sex education and highlights the interpretive repertoires of sexuality and gender. The authors argue th…
Released from Gender? Reflexivity, Performativity, and Therapeutic Discourses
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, reflexivity 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 perform…
Genderové aspekty českého školství [Gender Aspects of Czech Education]
Numerous Czech studies have been conducted on how the education system reproduces inequalities. While most of them have dealt with the reproduction of class inequalities, relatively few have focused on the reproduction of gender inequalities. In this article, the authors apply a conceptual understanding of the category of gender to research on education, an approach that avoids both universalising the category of woman, as well as the opposite ex…
Released from Gender? Reflexivity, Performativity, and Therapeutic Discourses
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, reflexivity 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 perform…
The Demise of Tradition and Its Salvation through Sex
In 2010 sex education became a surprising target of criticism in the secular Czech Republic. The voices of social conservatives were raised and were answered by the Minister of Education, who launched a reform of educational curricula to exclude sex education. This article analyses the discursive strategies employed by conservative opponents of sex education and highlights the interpretive repertoires of sexuality and gender. The authors argue th…
We treat them all the same, but…’. Disappearing ethnic homogeneity in Czech classrooms and teachers’ responses
This article argues that the Czech education system is structured to operate in an ethnically homogeneous society. Although the Czech Republic is becoming increasingly heterogeneous, teachers deploy discursive practices of ‛sameness despite difference’ that obscure such growing diversity. This article is grounded in the historical context of migration to and from the Czech Republic and based on ethnographic research in several ethnically-mixed cl…
Sex under socialism
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 publish…
Now you see them, now you don’t’. Sexual deviants and sexological expertise in communist Czechoslovakia
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 s…
Bumbling idiots or evil masterminds? Challenging cold war stereotypes about women, sexuality and state socialism
In academic writing, facts about the past generally require the citation of relevant sources unless the fact or idea is considered ?common knowledge:? bits of information or dates upon which there is a wide scholarly consensus. This brief article reflects on the use of ?common knowledge? claims in contemporary scholarship about women, families, and sexuality as experienced during 20th century, East European, state socialist regimes. We focus on s…
Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style
This is the first account of sexual liberation in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Kateřina Lišková reveals how, in the case of Czechoslovakia, important aspects of sexuality were already liberated during the 1950s - abortion was legalized, homosexuality decriminalized, the female orgasm came into experts' focus - and all that was underscored by an emphasis on gender equality. However, with the coming of Normalization, gender discourses revers…
Sexuality and gender in school-based sex education in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland in the 1970s and 1980s
Was there a state-socialist model of school sex education and if so, what characterized its form and content? What shaped the specificities and divergent characteristics of each country? The paper explores and compares programs of ‘education for family life’ as these became part of state-driven reproductive politics in late stages of state socialism in three countries (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary), with a particular focus on sexuality and gen…
Since they are here in Czechia, they should talk in Czech’. Ethnicity in peer groups at school
Classrooms in Czechia are changing. What used to be a relatively ethnically homogeneous environment changed after 1989 and became much more diverse. How are children, both of Czech, as well as migrant origin, coping? What strategies do they use to negotiate their everyday lives in the classroom? We conducted an ethnographic study in two classes of one multicultural Czech elementary school and used an inductive analytical strategy. While the fifth…
M uriel B laive , editor. Perceptions of Society in Communist Europe
The fact that the Cold War did not make Eastern European countries into omnipotent states that suppressed a withering society has already been established. Narratives of an evil party-state versus heroic individuals have proven untenable, and Perceptions of Society in Communist Europe: Regime Archives and Popular Opinion, edited by Muriel Blaive, contributes a welcome approach to this topic that depicts the communist state itself as a layered, of…
Sex and gender norms in marriage
First, we argue that sexuality was central to socialist modernization: Sex and gender were reformulated whenever the socialist project was being revised. Expertise was crucial in these reformulations, which harnessed people's support for the changing regimes. Moreover, the role of the expert in society grew over time, leading to ever expanding and diversified fields of expertise. Second, gender and sexuality stood disjointed in these changes. Whe…
Aging women as sexual beings. Expertise between the 1950s and 1970s in state socialist Czechoslovakia
The paper examines the changes during state socialism in Czechoslovakia in the understanding of the post-reproductive sexuality of women, focusing on the network of medical experts and shifts in expertise, which gave rise to a ‘new kind of person’: sexually active climacteric women. Analyzing the medical press, we show how Czechoslovak experts moved from an exclusive focus on women of reproductive age toward seeing climacteric women first in conn…
From class origins to individual psychopathology
Over the course of 40 years of state socialism, the explanation that Czechoslovak criminologists gave for spousal murder changed significantly. Initially attributing offences to the perpetrator's class origins, remnants of his bourgeois way of life, and the lack of positive influence from the collective in the long 1950s, criminologists then refocused their attention solely on the individual's psychopathology during the period known as ‘Normaliza…
Sex in the Cold War
Surprisingly, sexuality has not been at the centre of scholarship on post-war Central and Eastern Europe. While neighbouring topics, such as gender or everyday life, have been thoroughly and wonderfully researched (the list here is too long, but let me mention at least some shining examples), sexuality somehow escaped the spotlight. Path-breaking research done by Dagmar Herzog on East Germany or Dan Healey on Soviet Russia was for a long time not…
Sexual Knowledge and Expertise in Europe's East
East Central Europe played a crucial role in shaping the development of sexual science from the 1870s onwards. The life-histories of influential and well-known figures such as Sigmund Freud (born in Freiberg/Příbor), Magnus Hirschfeld (born in Kolberg/Kolobrzeg) and Karl Maria Kertbeny (born in Vienna, based in Budapest) reveal the imperial interconnectedness of East Central Europe with what would become Western Europe. By 1932, when the World Le…
Turning points in socialist medicine
Socialist states aspired to create modern, egalitarian societies with healthy citizens. Over the four decades of state socialism, experts debated whether premature children could achieve normal long-term mental development and full societal integration. This article analyses expertise networks to comparatively explore medical discussions regarding premature infants’ long-term development in Hungary, Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia. We exa…
Saving newborns, defining livebirth
After World War II, infant mortality rates started dropping steeply. We show how this was accomplished in socialist countries in East-Central Europe. Focusing on the two postwar decades, we explore comparatively how medical experts in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany saved fragile newborns. Based on an analysis of medical journals, we argue that the Soviet Union and its medical practices had only a marginal influence; the four co…
Early state socialism and eugenics
The article discusses the immediate post-war persistence and subsequent rejection of eugenics in East-Central European socialist states, exploring the case of premarital medical certificates. Building our analysis on published and archival sources, we show that immediately after the war, policies formulated at the governmental level were informed by eugenic ideas in medical expertise. Premarital medical certificates were aimed at combatting conta…
Dark Corners”
In 1966, the sexual murder of an eleven-year-old in Prague occupied the media and broader public, reinforcing expert debates about child sex offenders. In this article, we trace changes in medical experts’ understanding of child sex offenders in socialist Czechoslovakia between the late 1950s and mid-1970s. We show that psychiatrists and sexologists discussed forensic evaluation and the need for specialized treatment years before the 1966 case, b…
Political science (19 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Law (13 works) · European history and politics (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies (9 works) · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes (9 works)