Workshop “Biopower and Physical Violence: Embodied Experiences in Communist Europe”

Workshop organised by the Centre for Contemporary History, Potsdam (ZZF)

Funded by the Leibniz-Gemeinschaft

 

Concept: Muriel Blaive, Thomas Lindenberger

 

Departing from Michel Foucault, notably from his History of Sexuality, the biopolitical argument that a person’s body is a site of control is now well established. Applied to Communist Europe, the Foucauldian biopolitical perspective relativizes the singularity of communist would-be ‘totalitarianism’ (modern Western states have displayed distinct ‘totalitarian’ tendencies in the exercise of their rule, too) and shifts the analysis “onto a terrain that is irreducible to traditional terms like democracy, power, and ideology” (Robert Esposito.) Without denying the existing differences between communism and democracy, it greatly reduces the importance of ideology and of the East/West divide. It shifts the accent onto what eventually made a crucial long-term difference between the two systems, i.e. the construction of citizenship. By involving the notions of consent and bodily integrity, we will also bring into play physical violence, especially as applied to women.

 

 

 

 

Jan C. Behrends (ZZF Potsdam)

Welcome Words and Presentation of the Project Physical Violence and State Legitimacy in Late Socialism

 

Moderator: Thomas Lindenberger (ZZF Potsdam)

 

Christian König (Friedrich-Schiller University, Jena)

Individual Experiences of Women (and Men) with Hormonal Contraception in the GDR

 

15 minutes discussion

 

Muriel Blaive (Charles University, Prague)

Childbirth as an Embodied Experience: Women, Gender, and Biopower in Post-1968 Czechoslovakia

 

15 minutes discussion

 

 

Laura Hottenrott (Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin- Institut für Geschichte der Medizin)

Kombinat der Sonderheime für Psychodiagnostik und pädagogisch-psychologische Therapie (1964 - 1987)

 

15 minutes discussion

 

Fanny Le Bonhomme (Université Rennes 2 / ZZF Potsdam)

Macht und Kommunismus in der DDR: Erfahrungen von Patienten der Psychiatrischen-und Nervenklinik der Charité (Ost-Berlin, 1960-1968)

 

15 minutes discussion

 

General discussion on all four papers

 

 

Moderator: Jennifer Rasell (ZZF Potsdam)

 

Agnès Arp (Friedrich-Schiller University, Jena)

Demütigungen Strafen, Schläge, Drohungen und öffentliche Bloßstellungen: erinnerte Gewalt von ehemaligen Heimkindern aus Spezialheimen der DDR

 

15 minutes discussion

 

Barbara Klich-Kluczewska (Jagiellonian University of Krakow)

“That is a House of Fears”. Women and Their Experience of Violence in Postwar Poland

 

15 minutes discussion

 

 

Moderator: Annelie Ramsbrock (ZZF Potsdam)

 

General Discussion