Authors
Anna Dobrowolska1; 1 Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland Discussion
As the widespread stereotype maintains, there was no sexual revolution under state socialism. Sex was prudish, unimaginative, and constrained solely to reproductive purposes within heteronormative marriage. It was not until 1989 that people could start exploring their sexual identities and that modern sexual commerce emerged. However, if we turn out attention to material and visual culture, we discover that actually the opposite was true. The state-socialist period in Poland was a time of heated debates about sexuality and, most importantly, of profound transformation of both intimate lives and public discourses on sexuality. Erotic wares played a crucial, yet still underestimated role in this process.
The paper explores how material objects – such as erotic magazines, photographs, calendars, and various gadgets – arrived and circulated in Poland and transformed popular approaches toward sex in the late state-socialist period. The conclusions are based not only on traditional archival research, but also on my private collection of erotic memorabilia. By assembling an alternative archive of the Polish sexual revolution, I focus on materiality of such objects and investigate potential grassroots uses of socialist erotica, both in the 1970s and 1980s as well as in contemporary cultural memory. 
