This article analyses anti-obesity discourse in post-war Czechoslovakia, particularly in the country’s late socialist period. The article conceives of the discourse on obesity as a tool of biopolitical, rather than totalitarian, power, examining the ways expert knowledge, power, and morality worked together to produce a socialist subject. On the first level, it analyses the expert anti-obesity discourse as an example of the expertisation of public discourse in socialist Czechoslovakia. Second, it shows the construction of obesity in contrast to bodily ability, and the stigmatisation of the ‘fat’ body. On the last level, the article focuses on the gendered aspects of the discourse and demonstrates the ways in which the anti-obesity campaign supported the heteronormative framework of late socialism. By examining expert and media discourses, the article argues that the campaign against obesity served as a means to construct a proper socialist body and induce a moral panic about the state of socialism.
The article examines the works of nature writer Jaromír Tomeček, his public image, and his reception by literary theory and criticism as a distinctive late socialist response to environmental concerns. The article argues that the “ecological techno-optimism” of Jaromír Tomeček was representative of the late socialist reconsideration of human-nature relations that rejected the earlier modern understanding of humans as masters of nature and tried to find a new harmony between the two, but that also rejected the “pessimistic” perspective of Western ecology. Revising the tradition of socialist realism, late socialist literature allowed for sorrow over loss (“a right to sadness”) while still giving primacy to joy over progress, negating the “existential despair” of the 1960s. It thus preserved the progressive temporal orientation tied to the socialist ideal of increasing material wellbeing while trying to reconcile technocratic rationality with romantic subjectivity. “Ecological techno-optimism” eventually materialized in the form of the nuclear energy programme as the solution to the ecological crisis.