CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Turai, Ráhel Katalin |
|---|---|
| Title | Sexual Transitions: Biographical Bisexuality in Post-Socialist Hungary |
| Summary | My research investigates ‘biographical bisexuality’: personal narratives on multiple sexual desires characterized by shifts in the gender of object choice, in the context of contemporary Hungary. I ask what the organization of sexual experiences into life stories in the Central-Eastern European (CEE) region tells us about their formation vis-à-vis broader social discourses, of homo-/heterosexual and inter-/national, Eastern/Western belongings specifically. My analysis is based on the 26 biographical interviews I conducted with people in Budapest who report desires for both women and men over their life span. I show how their narratives constitute desires through the negotiation with ideas of ‘transitional’ trajectories, ideas which imply a normative scale of progress, rendering both bisexuality a phase and CEE catching up with the West. I argue that Hungarian biographical bisexualities anchor temporal sexual experiences in post-socialist oscillating dynamics of spatial categories on different scales from macro- to micro-levels. Narratives of hetero- and homosexuality as two separate life phases map onto the idea of Hungary shifting between binary inter-/national powers. Moreover, alternating sexual attractions, parallel relationships and sex, are interpreted through their connections to Hungarian LGBTQ and straight groups, notions of home, and the gendered-desiring body, respectively. Through pointing at the connection between ideas of geo-temporal and sexual trajectories in personal narrative experience, my research contributes to the rethinking of ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘sexual fluidity’ as fundamentally social. I suggest the introduction of ‘transition’ as a key term of queer temporality, the logic of which ultimately informs the ranking of all sexual and geospatial categories. |
| Supervisor | Renkin, Hadley Zaun |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/turai_rahel.pdf |
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