Disciplining gender and (homo)sexuality in state socialist Hungary in the 1970s

This article tells stories about how gender and (homo)sexual relations were disciplined in Hungary during the 1970s, part of the Kádár era, named after János Kádár, the top political leader of the People’s Republic of Hungary between 1956 and 1988. The first part of the article examines the widespread effects of the New Economic Mechanism of 1968, which could not be rounded off by political reform, on critical thoughts on family formation and – some large missing aspects of – gender equality. The second part of the article presents pieces of empirical evidence on the social existence of sexuality in the context of a system of ‘tolerant repression’ celebrating asexual socialist reproduction. The article concludes that most Hungarian people seemed to be able to negotiate their lives between the constraints of state socialism and their longing for enjoyable human relationships even in the ‘uniformly pallid’ 1970s