“I Love Shakespeare’s Sonnets and I am looking for someone to read them with:” The Role of Culture in Czechoslovak Queer Memories from the 1960s to 1980s, přednáška na konferenci Sexual Citizenship, Oral History, and the Archive in 1970s Central and Eastern Europe, 20.–22. září 2018, University of Warsaw

přednáška

angličtina

In the period of state socialism between the 1960s and 1980s, the Czechoslovak LGBT+ minority faced a fluid type of state-consecrated oppression. Although homosexuality was decriminalized in 1961, it remained a cause for public shaming, blackmailing and other types of psychological oppression. Despite this fact, queer communities continued to form and exist. In memories collected by the Society of Queer Memory among 60+ years-old gay and lesbian people, literary heritage, performative and visual arts are rarely mentioned. But when the narrators decide to talk about culture, they are very specific and go into extraordinary details. These exceptional references tell us a lot about specific ways how literary, performative and visual arts influenced the homosociability among upper/middle class gay and lesbian people and, as it turns out, it was regardless demographic centers and peripheries. The talk will focus on strategies of cultural sensitivity and cultural appropriation of gay and lesbian communities from the 1960s to 1980s in Czechoslovakia, based on a unique research pursued in the past 5 years by the Society of Queer Memory.

queer studies; queer history; queer memory; oral history; queer arts and culture

ZIKMUND-LENDER, L.

22. 9. 2018

University of Warsaw

Warsaw

https://www.crusev.ed.ac.uk/sexual-citizenship-oral-history-and-the-archive-in-1970s-central-and-eastern-europe-programme/