ABSTRACT
Sexuality and ethnic nationalism were intertwined in 20th-century Central-Eastern Europe (CEE) through discourses and policies on prostitution, eugenics, and homosexuality that primarily targeted women and ethnic minorities. In the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and multi-denominational Habsburg Monarchy, sexuality came to serve as a crucial discursive agent of ethnic nationalism as it gained greater popularity. The association of Jewish and ethnic minorities with non-normative sexual practices and immorality contributed to ethnic nationalist ideologies that were increasingly xenophobic and antisemitic. Policy toward prostitution, eugenics, and homosexuality was more concerned with regulating heterosexual acts—in public and private—through the policing of heterosexual women. The way sexuality connected with nationalism in CEE resulted in a flexible, complex, and at times, contradictory masculinity. Recent works on the history of homosexuality provide additional nuance to the relationship between nationalism and sexuality revealing the way ardent nationalism could tolerate certain forms of homosexuality, both male and female. This chapter illuminates how, at the same time as nationalists increasingly policed sexuality, they could excuse private homosexual behavior, as long as it did not interfere with people’s public contribution to the nationalist cause.
