Abstract
Recent scholarship has pointed out the transnational nature of Cold War sexuality: scholars have looked at issues such as the role of state-directed research, the varying roles of grassroots feminist movements, the changing vocabulary of sexual ethics, and the role of the official structures in the processes of sexual liberation. These accounts often challenge earlier black-and-white Cold War histories: one of the best known examples is Kristen R.
Ghodsee's controversial book "Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism" (2018). Looking at the situation in the Czech Republic (former Czechoslovakia), this paper connect these reconsiderations with close reading to explore the failure of the #MeToo movement to spark a wider debate.
It argues that #MeToo has been untranslatable to the post-socialist space in the first place. In this historical, linguistic and cultural context, the movement loses its collective appeal; it refers only to itself (and becomes an empty signifier).
To explore this missing discursive space, I look at Milan Kundera's 1967 novel The Joke (and its 1968 eponymous film adaptation). Sex and power, desire and violence, sexual transgressions and the failure of language to address them: these emerge as key topics of Kundera's text.
As a scholar of transnational literature, I look at the novel as a point of entry into (and a contribution to) what is a mainly a historical and sociological debate. As an activist and a translator, I am also searching for new vocabularies to address this gap.
By extension, looking at the #MeToo movement from a perspective of its translatability becomes another site of critique of the supposed universality and the global reach of the movement.