Kateřina Kolářová’s Rehabilitative Postsocialism: Disability, Sex, and Race in Eastern Europe uses the lens of crip theory to study the ways in which post-1989 Czech (and east central European more broadly) postsocialist public discourse has persistently foreclosed thinking outside of an aspirational relation to the socio-political norms of western liberalism, equated conveniently with democracy and freedom. Public enthusiasm about moving out from under the shadow of Soviet domination found rapid translation into a perennial rehabilitative catching up project, at first met with a degree of willingness that has in the ensuing decades frayed but continues to persist as a supposed relation to the necessary and natural order of things.
Kolářová calls attention to sometimes blunt, other times subtle, ways in which postsocialist social realities have justified austerity, inequality, and precarity for individuals and groups deemed inadaptable. She grounds her analysis of these pressures in an array of case studies, creative texts, art installations, and public statements that speak directly to east central European, and particularly Czech, public imagination in the postsocialist era. The materials Kolářová selects are mobilized as a springboard for articulating a framework situated at the intersection of queer, crip, and decolonial theory, through which she critiques the postsocialist forms of “stuckness” with neoliberalism.
Some of the case studies and texts cited in the book include a quote from a former student activist and recognizable disabled public figure prioritizing getting rid of the communist regime as more valuable to him than being able to walk. The quote appears meant to exemplify an intensity of feeling among those directly involved in organizing the 1989 revolution. It also facilitates Kolářová’s intended intersectional drift between disability and other registers of cultural political thought and practice. An excerpt from President Václav Havel’s 1990 speech declaring the country is “not well” serves to drive Kolářová’s point about how disability discourse is put to work to both signal social malaise and displace a critique of neoliberalism onto the language of disability. The documentary Jsem pozitivní, žiju s AIDS (I Am Positive, I Live with AIDS), at the time of its release in 1992 one of the first documentaries to focus on HIV and AIDS in Czechoslovakia, is another text examined in the book. The documentary is a postsocialist narrative par excellence, Kolářová argues, as it presents a story of a blameless victim infected by a dishonest lover, offering and interpretation of events as a product of socialist corruption. Wiktor Grodecki’s films, and particularly Mandragora (1997), are also among texts Kolářová analyzes to drive her points about postsocialism, neoliberalism, race, and sexuality. Kolářová works at inserting race and disability into a Mandragora narrative about gay tourism featuring wealthy foreigners exploiting poor Czech youth willing to do anything for compensation. Race gets identified as a subtext that Grodecki’ neglects, ignoring that the economically disadvantaged Roma population constitutes a great deal of the sex working trade.
Yet another case study examined in the book is a tragic socialist-era historical incident, a 1984 fire at the Institute of Social Care (Ústav sociální péče) in Měděnec, with 26 of 75 residents perishing. Kolářová pairs the incident in her discussion with a 1991 film, Requiem pro panenku (Requiem for a Doll, dir. Filip Renč), which, she writes, “transformed the tragic event into a metaphor of the individual’s struggle against the totalitarian state” (103). While the film essentially makes use of the fire as opportunity to criticize the former political regime, Kolářová points out that in neither the original historical report nor the film inspired by those events is there a hint of taking the mentally disabled as legitimate subjects worthy of consideration.
Kolářová draws on these and other case studies and texts to explore the manner in which becoming trapped in playing the perpetual game of catching up, of permanent rehabilitative reconstruction, takes on specific form in the Czech context, generally not rendering refusal easily. Nonetheless, the decades of living life in the shadow of neoliberal contradictions has begun to show signs of wearing thin and Kolářová looks for ways in which critical and constructive dissent might effectively be expanded. She places considerable stock in cripping the postsocialist imaginary as a useful tactic for disrupting the conventional narrative of development and postponement. Her point seems aimed toward identifying and then amplifying existing openings in the Czech cultural discourse. If only Czechs might be persuaded to put aside the never-ending rehabilitative aspirational game underwritten by hopes of a place at the table of the western political economy. But the book itself points out the resistances to such a move as deeply embedded in Czech culture, and a serious question thus remains as to how effectively queer/crip sensibility might contend with long standing biases and bigotries.
A great deal of the book’s service comes in the light cast on cultural practices, public expressions, and events shaping the post-1989 decades. While arguably added critical light is not likely enough by itself to create a better path, their demystification can have a usefulness. Also, more simply perhaps, maintaining a critical memory of the occasionally uncomfortable moments one might otherwise prefer to forget provides a necessary foundation for informed action. Rehabilitative Postsocialism, while questioning many of the disingenuous post-revolutionary lures that have dominated much of the past several decades of Czech life, gives voice to its own aspirational vector, reaching for a constructive alternative to a cultural fate as western liberalism’s permanent apprentice. Breaking out of liberalism’s hold stands as a struggle across cultural contexts east and west, not built in a day and no more likely simply brushed aside. Kolářová does an interesting job in finding prospectively allied standpoints from the west and also in being attentive to many of the distinctions defining the roughly analogous situations for Czechs.
