The Embodiment of Deviance: The Biopolitics of the “Difficult Child” in Socialist Czechoslovakia

Abstract

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Family, Gender and (dis)Abled Bodies after 1953”, guest-edited by Maike Lehmann and Alexandra Oberländer.

In this article, I examine the academic discourses and socio-educational practices in post-war socialist Czechoslovakia concerning children who were considered “behaviorally difficult,” and I analyze those discourses and practices as elements of biopolitics and governmentality. I concentrate on the diagnostic conceptualizations introduced into the psycho-medical discourse of the 1950s and 1960s by what was called “defectology.” Czechoslovak defectologists, who composed their approaches from Soviet, Czech, and other academic sources, explained children’s difficult behavior in terms of “defectivity,” that is, a disturbed relationship between the individual and his or her social environment. The educational aims of defectology and the communist regime converged in the ideal of the “embodiment of socialism,” according to which the difficult child should be taught to be a conforming, able-minded, and productive citizen. The preferred treatment for reaching this goal was reeducation in the expanding network of residential institutions. However, defectology had no solution to the increasing number of children diagnosed as difficult or deviant. Moreover, other disciplines, like psychology, pediatrics, and pedagogy, criticized its conceptual inadequacy, which reoriented the discourse and governmentality toward prevention. I also show how gender and ethnicity abetted the diagnosis and affected the treatment of behavioral difficulties, for defectologists and other practitioners considered “sexually depraved” girls and “Gypsy children” as the “embodiment of deviance.”