Galicia: A Forgotten Cradle of Sexual Modernity

Balancing between culture and nature organizes interpretations of gender and sexuality in the Western world. In whatever way we identify when it comes to our sexuality, we are primarily either “born this way” or a product of social construction. But neither natural nor cultural theories of sexuality are exclusive paths for social justice and emancipation. For instance, one could claim that same-sex desire is a natural phenomenon, observed in many species, and thus should not be subject to repression. Alternatively, a proponent of cultural interpretations could point to the diversity of understandings of same-sex desires in various civilizations. The study of this diversity gives us the ability to consciously shape our own identity, avoiding a level determinism inherent to the biological outlook. It is the cultural lens that may swiftly induce innovation in personal and public approaches to sexuality.

In fin de siècle Europe, the development of the cultural theory of sexuality was quite a breakthrough. Together with similar voluntaristic approaches, its appearance signified the end of scientific positivism and the ascension of the modernist era. The cultural theory of sexuality came from the margins to undermine the racial and biologist hegemony in mainstream European understandings of gender and sexuality. This former outlook and the scientific communities that applied it were very hesitant to include persons from marginalized communities: queers, Jews, and members of Slavic peasant nations. In Galicia, a Habsburg borderland, these three groups were represented significantly. Many of their members moved to Vienna, contributing to the city’s golden age of cultural and scientific production. Others migrated to the United States and played a significant role in forming the fantasies of Hollywood. Some stayed in Galicia and—as novelists, playwrights, physicians, or ethnographers—productively applied the cultural outlook to understand the sexual aspects of the complex class and ethnic relations of the crown land.

The family of Sigmund Freud, with whom cultural analysis of sexuality will forever be associated, came from Galicia. First- and second-generation Galician migrants dominated the ranks of early psychoanalysis. Among them were Wilhelm Reich, a Freudo-Marxist who coined the term “sexual revolution,” Helene Deutsch, the first woman in the collective who defined the psychoanalytic understandings of motherhood, and Isidor Sadger, who established the concept of narcissism as we use it today. Furthermore, the Galician-born Bronisław Malinowski undertook a shift similar to Freud’s in his discipline of anthropology. What if their Galician background mattered as much as their experience in the metropoles to the development of their innovations?

Galicia has always epitomized miserable parochialism. To this day, Poles from Warsaw and Ukrainians from Kyiv judge their Galician compatriots for provincial conservatism. In the Habsburg period, the Jewish-German author Karl Emil Franzos called Galicia a “Half-Asia” for its lack of proper civilizational development. The Polish novelist and playwright Gabriela Zapolska exposed the hypocrisy prevalent among Kraków and Lviv’s middle classes, shown in scenes of violent exploitation of domestic workers. By the late 19th century, nothing influenced ideas about Galicia’s sexual norms more than “white slavery” debates. The nationalist press and law-enforcement agents assigned this name to the mass exodus of women for sex work to several destinations around the world. If we combine “white slavery” with “Half-Asia,” we do not get a mere periphery: this mix of orientalizing narratives and exploitation signified an attempt to colonize this land.

But a post-colonial critique of the Galician sexual regime cannot on its own explain the conditions that produced innovations in the theory of sexuality. To do so, it is necessary to see the region in its proximity to and distance from the West alike. Galicians felt the distinction between the metropolitan West and their homeland. But, unlike the colonized populations in maritime empires, they did not experience an unpassable line of color and established racial apartheid. Galicians were free to integrate with the West or to build their identity in opposition to Western standards. Furthermore, unlike in the Russian empire, Galician Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians were equal citizens of the Habsburg empire, and they had established cultural autonomy. For example, Franzos integrated with German culture and accepted its normative standards as his own but he was also free to choose a different path. This possibility of choice and extent of assimilation was unattainable for British and French colonial subjects.

The dominant European middle-class sexual regime came to Galicia in a very normative and masculinist version. Galician intellectuals associated what is conventionally referred to as the Victorian repressive regime with standards imposed by German nationalism, which eagerly assigned Orientalized Eastern European men with savage ruggedness or, in a contradictory fashion, with masochistic submissiveness. Fin de siècle intellectuals observed that the generation of their parents would fully embrace Victorian standards to escape orientalization. Rather than affirming their normativity, these young modernists were more interested in forming an alternative to what they perceived as foreign and repressive impositions.

The young modernists found that such an alternative might develop in the contact with “the people.” Many Galician intellectuals who observed and experienced sexual attitudes of the rural and urban working classes, began to perceive them as a Naturvolk. Malinowski and Reich grew up observing the customs of Galician highlanders, the former in the west and the latter in the east of the crown land. Both claimed the authenticity of their “free” sexual attitude, which contrasted with the repression governing their middle-class families. The cracks in the normative character of the European sexual regime was more visible from the edge, allowing Reich and Malinowski to undermine it later in life.

In 1912, the Ukrainian ethnographer Wolodymyr Hnatjuk, working together with the author Ivan Franko, published the two-volume Sexual Life of Ukrainian Peasantry: a collection of hundreds of short erotic stories gathered through ethnographic research. Its prime purpose was differentiation from the German sexual regime, showing its repressive character in opposition to Ukrainian “free love,” constituting a somewhat surprising twist in the history of Ukrainian nationalism. This work was supported in Germany by the ethnographer Fredrich S. Krauss, who published it under the auspices of his journal Anthropophyteia, which soon after was banned by the imperial authorities for immorality. Together with Krauss’s work about the Balkans, Sexual Life of Ukrainian Peasantry was an important point of reference in Freud’s theory of culturally developed sexual repression.

Galician intellectuals could decide to align with “the people” or with “civilized” bourgeois standards. Both choices yielded innovative results and gave birth to the cultural outlook. In Freud and Franzos’ cases, assimilation required severance from racialized discourse and the introduction of an indeterministic intellectual framework. The cultural theory of sexuality thus was a necessary tool of assimilation. But it also served Reich and Hnatjuk to undermine the middle-class repressive regime. This shows that, whether their intention is assimilation or disruption, those who move from the margins to the center are set to be revolutionaries.

Michał Narożniak is a historian and researcher at the European University Institute, Florence. He was a Jerzy Giedroyc Junior Visiting Fellow at the IWM in 2024.