CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Cajkovicova, Kristina |
|---|---|
| Title | Shifting to the 'Gadzo Question': The Role of Racialized Sexuality in the Biopolitical Consolidation of Czechoslovak Collectivity |
| Summary | Subjugation of Roma in the region of the Central and Eastern Europe has been deployed as a long-term power mechanism. A large body of scholarship focuses on the history of the presence of Roma within the region and describes the tactics that are specific to this time and space. However, because they do not conceptualize these tactics in a biopolitical perspective certain nuances are left unexplored. In my thesis, I approach ‘normalization’ (1968-1989), the period of late communism in Czechoslovakia, as a biopolitical episode which manifested through the selective population control in the form of coercive sterilization of Roma women. I focus on the discursive mechanisms of othering and marginalization put into work within the discursive field of the "Gypsy question". I analyse sources dedicated to the social and educational work with Roma minority, published between years 1968-1989, to trace discursive mechanisms of racialization through differentiation and hierarchization of human subjects. I particularly focus on the construction of the Roma sexuality within those discourses to explore the role of sexuality in the process of national identity building as well as the implication of the racial logic within it. In building on the scholarship exploring the possibility of insights of the critical race theories and postcolonial studies I deepen an understanding of the role of particular discursive constructions of Roma in the process of constituting the whiteness of the Czechoslovak collectivity. I propose, that the practice of sterilization of Roma women during the period of ‘normalization’ is the outcome of the biopolitical mechanisms of racialization which constituted Roma subjects as unable to fulfil hegemonic sexual and gender norms. Further, I propose, that the whiteness of the Czechoslovak citizens is developed as a moral category through the assignment of racialized meanings to the realm of sexuality. My analysis offers new insights and opens space for asking questions about the role of the whiteness in the national projects of countries of Central and Eastern Europe as well as it considers the potential of queer theories to the scholarly field of Critical Romani Studies |
| Supervisor | Redai, Dorottya; Yoon Hyaesin |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/cajkovicova_kristina.pdf |
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