Politics of Desire: Postcommunist Czech Shakespeare and Non-normative Masculinity

Abstract

If hierarchical essential gender relations, discussed in the previous chapter, have become a crucial component of postcommunist subjectivity resistant to external manipulation by normative requirements of the EU, heteronormativity has become its undeniable centrepiece. The precariously ambivalent postcommunist cultural framework discourages non-normative gender relations within heterosexual relationships. It is similarly ambivalent about non-normative variants of sexuality, particularly those that challenge dominant heteronormative masculinity, which has traditionally been seen as being at the core of national citizenship. This ambivalence is simultaneously proactive, in that it reflects cultural attempts at defining the boundaries of the postcommunist Czech society, and reactive in its persistent resistance to external pressures on the process of postcommunist development. In the context of guiding the restructuring of normative boundaries of gendered subjectivity in its candidate states, the EU has required legislation granting equal citizenship and social rights to homosexually-identified citizens as a condition of the eventual accession of CEE countries to the Union. In a parallel responsive move, Czech society — fuelled by a neoliberally-provoked crisis of masculinity — performed the double-move of seemingly accepting the forthcoming relevant legislation while intensifying its normative masculine frameworks of cultural reference.