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Queer Urban Underworlds in European State Socialism

Spaces of Resistance and Survival

Queer Urban Underworlds in European State Socialism cover

Queer Urban Underworlds in European State Socialism

Spaces of Resistance and Survival

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Pre-order. Available Jul 22 2027
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Description

This volume redefines the history of queer life in Central and Eastern Europe outside the USSR by uncovering how individuals and communities navigated repression, surveillance, and marginalization from the post-World War II era to early post-socialism.


Moving beyond legal and political narratives, Queer Urban Underworlds in European State Socialism reveals the hidden networks, informal spaces, and subcultures that shaped queer survival and resistance. Through archival research, oral histories, and underground media analysis, it challenges Cold War binaries of repression and liberation, demonstrating how queer agency actively shaped spaces of sociability, self-expression, and defiance within socialist societies.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Jaromír Mrnka
Chapter 1. Framing "Queer Urban Underworlds": Historiography, Theoretical Foundations, and Socialist Contexts
Dan Healey
Chapter 1. Queer Underworlds as Resistance and Subversion in Eastern and Post-Socialist Europe
Jaromír Mrnka & Thomas Heise
Section I: Spaces of Sociability and Survival
Chapter 2. Queer Spatial Experience in Czechoslovak State Socialism
Ladislav Jackson
Chapter 3. Your Eternally Hungry Heart: Gender Expression and Queer Experiences of Women Political Prisoners in Socialist Czechoslovakia, 1948–1968
Marie Koval
Section II: Cultural Practices and Subversions
Chapter 4. From Viks to Kekec: Tracing Ljubljana's Queer Communities through Magazines of the 1980s and 1990s
Tery Žeželj & Darko Ilin
Chapter 5. Ecologies of Desire: Bialoszewski's Cultural Practices in the 1970s
Martyna Miernecka
Section III: Activism, Marginality, and Authority
Chapter 6. The 1980s Budapest Queer 'Underworld' Under the Spotlight
Kata Benedek
Chapter 7. Accepting, Bypassing, or Ignoring Authority? Queer Activism in the People's Republic of Poland
Magda Wlostowska
Section IV: Legal, Gender, and Literary IntersectionsChapter 8. Decadents and Saboteurs: Queer Men on Trial in Post-War Socialist Yugoslavia (1945–1951)
Franko Dota
Chapter 9. The Other Yugoslavs: Class and Sexuality in Yugoslav Literature
Natalija Stepanovic
Chapter 10. Transsexuality in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia
Christiane Brenner
Conclusion
Vera Sokolová

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published Jul 22 2027
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Pages 256
ISBN 9798216365310
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations 20 b&w illus.
Dimensions 229 x 152 mm
Series Interdisciplinary Studies on Spatial Dynamics and Marginalization in Central and Eastern Europe
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Jaromír Mrnka

Jaromír Mrnka is head of the Prague Branch of the…

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