CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Veszely, Zsofia |
|---|---|
| Title | Sex Education and Sexual Knowledge in State-Socialist Hungary, 1960s to 1980s |
| Summary | The thesis discusses sex education and the generation and negotiation of sexual knowledge in state-socialist Hungary in the period between the 1960s and the 1980s. Using and intersectional approach and a gender perspective, it explores the complex history of Hungarian sex education through a focus on the networks of the Ministry of Health, a women’s organization (MNOT), and a youth organization (KISZ), with a special attention to the period’s gender politics, population and reproductive policies. It emphasises the mutual relations of gender, power, and knowledge in sex education, not only in its content but also in the processes of and encounters with sexual knowledge production. The thesis explores the inclusion and exclusion of various social groups from sex education and their access to birth control methods, based on gender, ethnicity, class, age, marital status. Sex education appeared throughout the country and involved a wide range of actors already in the 1960s and was complemented by school-based sex education from the mid-1970s, but with limited access to sexual knowledge on the Hungarian countryside, where the Roma was represented in large numbers. Practices of counselling, school-based sex education, and magazine agony columns reveal how couples and individuals shaped sex education and participated in thematizing sexuality. On the one hand, MNOT and KISZ promoted gender equality, an equal partnership agenda, and men’s responsibility through sex education. On the other hand, expert (medical) knowledge was often associated with male sex educators; female representatives of KISZ and MNOT often engaged in traditionally feminine tasks through sex education; encounters between the educators and the groups to be educated show the reluctance of many young men to take responsibility in the case of unwanted pregnancies. |
| Supervisor | Zimmermann, Susan; Kraft, Claudia |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/veszely_zsofia.pdf |
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