Kateřina Lišková

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 classrooms. We analyze the ways in which teachers talk about their pupils. We show that in the case of migrant children, teachers tend not to see their differences and hence, their potentially structural disadvantages. On the other hand, the Roma ethnicity is perceived as insurmountable. Teachers mobilize lists of cultural and even genetic differences to legitimize their different treatment of Roma pupils. Furthermore, we analyze policy documents regarding the education of non-Czech pupils and their reception by teachers. All these strategies result in the continuing perception of Czech classrooms as ethnically homogeneous while disregarding any social inequalities.

‘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 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.

Sex under Socialism. From Emancipation of Women to NormalizedFamilies in Czechoslovakia.

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.

Released from gender? Reflexivity, performativity, and therapeutic discourses1

My paper is an analysis of contemporary Czech expert discourses on love and coupledom, framed within ongoing feminist discussions of sociological theorys emphasis on the individualization, reflexivity and detraditionalization of gender. Using Bourdieus 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 reflexivity theory by pointing to its flawed voluntarism, and also allows for grasping transformation through fissures between a perlocutionary act and its reception.

Žádná různost není, všichni jsme tu stejní. Děti migrantů,jejich spolužáci a vyučující na českých základních školách

V tomto clanku si vsimame toho, jak se ceský vzdělavaci system vypořadava s rostouci etnickou různorodosti. Zaměřujeme se přitom jak na perspektivu pedagogů, kteři uci ve třidach navstěvovaných dětmi migranty z Ukrajiny, Ruska, Vietnamu, tak na perspektivu samotných děti migrantů a jejich spolužaků. Předkladame výsledky analýzy dat ziskaných v průběhu etnografickeho výzkumu na vybraných skolach po cele Ceske republice. Vedle individualnich rozhovorů s pedagogy jsou to zejmena skupinove rozhovory s dětmi, v nichž identifikujeme diskurzivni strategie a repertoary charakteristicke zneviditelňovanim etnicity a udržovanim představy etnicky homogenniho celku. Cilem tohoto clanku je analýza procesů zneviditelňovani etnicity, ktere je v promluvach pedagogů spojeno s humanistickým ramovanim osobnosti žaka a u samotných žaků migrantů se projevuji performovanim normalnosti a bezproblemovosti, ktera ovsem musi být stvrzena jejich ceskými spolužaky. Etnickou různorodost v ceských skolach chapeme jako prostoupenou diskurzem stejnosti navzdory různosti.