By focusing on the politics of disability as a pillar of Czechoslovak identity, The Politics of Disability in Interwar and Socialist Czechoslovakia: Segregating in the Name of the Nation reflects upon the vicissitudes of nation building over the twentieth century that led to extreme forms of institutional violence against minorities, mainly the Roma, such as forced sterilization. The authors trace the intersectionality of ethnicity and disability, which proliferated across diverse realms of public life, positioning the continuities and ruptures of interrogating propaganda and racial science during the interwar and post-war periods as establishing and reinforcing the border between a healthy Czech majority and a disabled Roma minority. The book critically revises this border that remains observable but unapproachable until it operates as a part of constructing the authenticity of a nation.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Archives and Used Abbreviations
- Introduction
- The Politics of Disability: Structure and Agency in Nation Building in Czechoslovakia
- Part 1. Building the Czechoslovak Nation and Sacralizing Peoples’ Health: The Vicissitudes of Disability Discourse during the Interwar Period
- 1. Establishing National Public Health in Interwar Czechoslovakia
- Contexts and Contests
- 1.1 Sacralizing people’s health in interwar Czechoslovakia: In search of new drivers for mobilizing the nationals
- 1.2 Epistemic communities: The struggle for political influence
- 1.3 The institutionalization of health care: Between multiple challenges and limited options
- 1.4 The reform of public health: Great unmet expectations
- 1.5 Debates around inferiority and reproductive policies: The Tower of Babylon
- 2. The Discourse of Disability
- A Noah’s Ark for the New Nation?
- Victoria Shmidt and Karel Pančocha
- 2.1 Functional health: The utilitarian discourse of disability
- 2.2 Men in focus: Functional health as a part of the gender-imbalanced propaganda of public health
- 2.3 The politics of positive discrimination for legionnaires: The salt of the earth
- 2.4 Children with disabilities: The last shall be first
- 3. Politics Concerning the Roma during the Interwar Period
- Therapeutic Punishment vs. Benevolent Paternalism
- 3.1 The Gypsy gangs in Bohemia: The invasion of infectious diseases
- 3.2 The politics of disease in the periphery: Moral campaigns against the Roma as part of the internal colonization of Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia
- 3.3 The law on the fight against Gypsies, vagabonds and those unwilling to work: Converting moral panics into strict surveillance
- 3.4 Štampach and his survey of the “Gypsies”: An initial approximation of the eugenic framework
- Conclusion
- Part 2 Postwar Institutionalization of Care for the Disabled: Toward a Universalized Discourse of “Defective Gypsies”
- 4. Special Education in Czechoslovakia between 1939 and 1989
- Toward Multilevel Hierarchy of Defectivity
- Frank Henschel and Victoria Shmidt
- 4.1 The politics of disability during the Protectorate: Toward institutionalizing special education
- 4.2 The politics of disability in the period 1945 to 1948: Between the task of differentiation and lack of placements
- 4.3 Producing biopolitical knowledge: Defectology and special pedagogy during the socialist period
- 4.4 The discourse on defective children: Between family care and education as a tool of surveillance
- 4.5 Institutionalization, segregation and rehabilitation of the “defective” child
- Conclusion
- 5. The Intersectionality of Disability and Race in Public and Professional Discourses about the Roma in Socialist Czechoslovakia
- Between Propaganda and Race Science
- 5.1 The political turbulence of postwar policies concerning the Roma
- 5.2 Public attitudes toward the Roma as a product of the propaganda war during the late 1950s
- 5.3 The Marxist ideology and surveillance of the Roma
- 5.4 Racial assimilationism: Theoretical grounds for the destabilization of the Roma
- 5.5 The Postwar renaissance of racial assimilationism: The Interplay of national and international academic agendas
- 5.6 Linguistic assimilation: Invalidating the Roma language
- 5.7 Bad parenting and deficient childhood: The neocolonial negation of the Roma family
- 5.8 The anthropological argument for placing the Roma children into institutions: “In the name of acceleration”
- Conclusion
- 6. The Forced Sterilization of Roma Women between the 1970s and the 1980s
- The Rise of Eugenic Socialism
- 6.1 Czech eugenics during the postwar period: Emancipation from a dirty past
- 6.2 Genetic counseling as a part of demographic reform in the 1960s: Serving the interest of the nation
- 6.3 From sterilization against “defective” births to sterilization of those who live in “defective” conditions
- 6.4 Sterilization of the socially unfit: The last battle before legalization
- 6.5 The hidden agenda of socialist authorities in the 1980s: From suppressing publicity of sterilization to its massive practice
- Conclusion
- Conclusions
- Going from Knowledge about the Violent Past to Acknowledging It
- Abstracts in German and French
- Bibliography
- Index
- List of Figures
- Figure 1 The nuns at the hospital in Trnava, Slovakia, as shown in a report on the miserable state of Slovak hospitals prepared by Slovak authorities for the Ministry of Health and Physical Culture in 1923
- Figure 2 Kašpárek is bringing a toothbrush and toothpaste for the main character (1927)
- Figure 3 The child audience, mainly boys, at a puppet show in The Clown and Budulínek (Kašparek a Budulínek, by Karel Driml, 1927)
- Figure 4 The brotherhood of disabled men: stills from the film How Vashik Got His Legs (Jak Vašíček přišel k nohám, 1921)
- Figure 5 Roman Roda-Růžička as Dvořák in Fortuitous Moment (Osudná chvíle, 1935)
- Figure 6 Roman Roda-Růžička as Juro in The Shadow in the Light/Blind Juro/Stubborn Juro (Stín ve světle/Slepý Juro/Tvrdochlavý Juro, 1929)
- Figure 7 The emblem of the legionnaires’ participation in the 1929 exhibition held in Táboř, a city directly associated with the history of Hussites, featuring the image of Jan Žižka against the background of the city walls
- Figure 8 A postcard showing a Gypsy circus in Subcarpathian Ruthenia in the 1920s
- Figure 9 The distribution of trachoma in Slovakia in 1921, according to official statistics
- Figure 10 The Gypsy circus in the documentary part of Stín ve světle (1929)
- Figure 11 Roma students in the classroom at čolakovo near Košice, Slovakia, 1965
- Figure 12 The canteen in the school at čolakovo near Košice, Slovakia, 1965
- Figure 13 The Model of Differentiation, Assimilation and Isolation of the Roma
- Figure 14 A Roma mother who was a foster caregiver for a boy
- Figure 15 Roma siblings who were placed in a boarding school after the age of seven
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