Looking at the timeframe of the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, this chapter examines the links between post-state-socialism (Grabowska, 2012) and sex education from a diasporic Central and Eastern European perspective. Research on sex education in post-state-socialist countries has been done through the lens of public health concerns around “risky” behaviors and the prevention of HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted infections, and teenage pregnancies (Regushevskaya, Dubikaytis, Nikula, Kuznetsova, & Hemminki, 2009; Shapiro, 2001). Although these concerns are legitimate and important, such framing leaves out the multitudinal ways in which education and sex education are involved in what we describe in this piece as “teaching it straight”—the continued insistence on (and frequent failure of) straightening students into heteronormative life paths and desires. While the importance of sex education as an inherently political practice has been well established, few scholars have focused their attention on how post-state-socialist sex education is shaped by ideas around religion , patriotism, and nationalism in transnational and diasporic contexts (see Chervyakov & Kon, 2000; Lukovitskya & Buchanan, 2012; Snarskaya, 2009). In the spirit of transnational queer studies , and as we will explore throughout, we understand concepts such as “nationhood” broadly, struggling against the straightening expectation that to be of a place or of a family, is to be a carrier of a certain heteronormatively bound, reproductive, and optimistic futurity that nonetheless always keeps the fires of the past—of traditions, language, patriarchal histories—alight. In our work, we draw on Benedict Anderson’s (2006) conceptualization of nation as an “imagined community” forged through shared myths, performances, and representations. Our analysis is also informed by feminist critiques of belonging and exclusions constructed through gendered and racialized nationalisms (McClintock, 1993; Yuval-Davis, 1993).

Drawing on two autoethnographic accounts of sexual silences in a municipal secondary school in Yekaterinburg, Russia and a Polish diasporic immersion school in Alberta, Canada ,Footnote 1 we will consider how “teaching it straight”—especially along the lines of heterosexuality and childhood desexualization—plays out. Our chapter opens with an exploration of how we envision the operation of “teaching it straight” in post-state-socialist contexts and our autoethnographic methodology of “telling it slantwise .” Next, we provide a brief chronological overview of the history of sex education in Russian and diasporic Polish contexts. Through the entry point of our own experiences, we comprise two narratives about how despite an ongoing silence around questions of sex and sexuality, we were patriated into regulatory systems of a specific sexual subjecthood bound to gendered, racialized, and classed discourses that romanticized innocence and virginity. Each of our autoethnographic tellings discusses the multiple and complex ways in which sex education has become a battleground for competing discourses in the contexts of post-state-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. This chapter provides a reconstructed and remembered account of sexual education in two post-socialist contexts. Through doing this, we not only provide insight into the experiences of undergoing sexual education in the post-socialist schooling systems but we also queer the parameters of storytelling, through the process of “telling it slantwise.” Developing our own queer and feminist approach to “dialogued collaborative autoethnography ” (Martinez & Andreatta, 2015, p. 224), we reflect on what it means to be straightened in diasporic and transnational post-state-socialist contexts.

Teaching It Straight, Telling It Slantwise: Notes on Method

Sex education at the two sites we examine—Yekaterinburg, Russia and a diasporic Polish community in Alberta, Canada —has been organized primarily with an inclination toward “teaching it straight.” “Teaching it straight” is, of course, not particular to Eastern European or diasporic contexts but is characteristic of many paradigms of sex education, as has been documented in Western sites including in North America (Fields, 2008; Kendall, 2013; Trudell, 1993). “Teaching it straight,” we suggest, is an approach to teaching sex education that relies on several primary axes. First and most obviously, “teaching it straight” relies on a heterosexual presumption , an insistence on heterosexuality as the natural, primary, and legitimate form of sexuality and sexual practice. “Teaching it straight” also relies on a straightening out—a making straight. This making straight involves multiple processes including, literally, attempting to make students straight (not gay, not lesbian, not bisexual, not queer). More broadly, it also involves putting students on a “straight path,” or in Polish, an ethics of “wyjść na prostą drogę” (literally translated as “to come out on a straight path”). This includes editing queerness out of behavior, fantasy, or life course in a broad temporal and spatial sense. Most queerly and literally “wyjść na prostą” (“to come out on the straight”) or “wyjść na prostą drogę” (“to come out on a straight path”) is used specifically as well in regard to homosexuality to mark a committed rejection of homosexuality in oneself, to ask forgiveness for these sins, and to engage in the long journey of repenting and recalibrating life so as to be on the straight (and narrow) path.

Queer theorist, Sara Ahmed (2006), talks about “straightening devices ” as those life interferences that act as a corrective to queer, or “slantwise,” desires (p. 72). Thus, “to be ‘in line’ is to direct one’s desires toward marriage and reproduction; to direct one’s desires toward the reproduction of the family line” (p. 74). And more broadly, to be “na prostej drodze” (“on the straight path”)—that is to be literally on a straight path—is to be on the path that one is expected to be on. Crucially, when it comes to sex education, that “straight path” involves a distinct invocation of an idea of childhood that insists on categorically dividing childhood from adolescence and from adulthood. Childhood surfaces in this straightened path as a domain that must be protected from sexuality and corruption so that childhood innocence may be retained (Kincaid, 1998; Stockton, 2009). Adolescence, on the other hand, emerges as a life moment during which sexuality is excessive and must be contained so that it does not sully the straight-life prospects and futures of those in question (Pascoe, 2007, p. 26). Thus, childhood is effectively desexualized—that is, forcibly protected from the sphere of what is imagined to be sexual—while adolescence, rendered frightfully hypersexual, is disciplined—straightened—into particular shapes, forms, and anticipated futures. Also, while childhood is desexualized, a certain sexual presumption still dominates as an insistence that everyone will be sexual when they arrive into adulthood, editing out asexual possibilities (Przybylo, n.d.). “Teaching it straight” involves the grouping of students into particular patterns—racial, classed, gendered—so that they emerge on the “straight” path—the path set aside for them.

In this piece, we undertake a collective autoethnography that struggles against teaching or telling it straight . Indeed, we would like to identify our autoethnographic approach as, after Ahmed, “telling it slantwise.” If teaching or telling something straight means sticking to the rules set aside before our arrival, “telling it slantwise” means looking backward with dissonance, disbelief, and oppositionality. To be slantwise, for Ahmed, is to refuse (or be incapable of) treading on well-worn paths set aside for us by the repetition of bodies on particular paths—“in following the direction, I arrive, as if by magic” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 16). To travel these paths slantwise is to take a route unexpected, arriving somewhere other than anticipated. “Telling it slantwise” also signals a looking backward that is queer and that queers the diasporic longing for a fixed home. Stuart Hall (2003), writing on diaspora, argues that it is characterized by “an endless desire to return to ‘lost origins,’ to be one again with the mother, to go back to the beginning” (p. 245). Queer theorist Gayatri Gopinath (2005) responds to this diasporic impulse, saying that the queer diasporic body and queer diasporic desire handle ideas of home and memory differently, “as a past time and place riven with contradictions and the violences of multiple uprootings, displacements, and exiles” (p. 4). For us, to look backward is to think about the straightness and slantness of our diasporic lives. Within the context of conservative schooling that ignored histories and realities of gendered power relations in Russia , Polina consistently sought out information on women’s rights and developed a strong interest in gender justice, eventually moving to Canada to conduct feminist research on women and media. Ela, born in Poland and raised in a diasporic Polish community in Alberta, Canada , continues to feel queerly misaligned with both Canadian and Polish cultures and languages, such that queerness becomes not so much a sexual orientation but a bodily one. In turning backward, we feel alighted with Gopinath’s queer diasporic orientation—being caught between and constituted through the sometimes-competing demands of feminism, queerness, whitesettler identity in Canada , diasporic post-state-socialist legacies, familial obligations, pressures of language proficiency, and particular generational lineages.

Our method for writing this autoethnography is engaged with a type of inquiry that has been termed collaborative autoethnography (Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez, 2010; Martinez & Andreatta, 2015) or duoethnography (Denzin, 2014; Farquhar & Fitzpatrick, 2016). Citing Norman Denzin’s (2014) statement that duoethnographers “perform new writing practices” (p. 28) and challenge the boundaries between biography and history, Alejandra Martines and Maria Marta Andreatta (2015) draw attention to the creative possibilities of collaborative inquiry. While Martinez and Andreatta, developing their collaborative autoethnography, first write their personal histories and then engage each other with questions, our piece develops a reverse approach: we first asked each other questions and then responded through our autoethnographic remembrances. That is, we each assigned questions to the other so as to generate particular knowledge about each other’s life histories that is beyond the immediate reach of our several-year friendship . In our discussions, we focused on both generating data to explore our experiences with sexuality, education, and sex education, but we also used this project as a means of attending to our friendship. Our questions to each other varied but focused on kinships, spatialities, temporalities, possibilities, and impossibilities around how we remember ourselves as feeling and who we remember ourselves as being.

This chapter is not intended as a comparative analysis since our years in school were shaped through vastly dissimilar social, economic, religious, and ideological conditions. We write, similar to Martines and Andreatta, from a place of friendship and collaboration, which we see in itself as an oppositional act against schooling systems that prize and reward individualism. Academia, as Kelly J. Baker (2016) recently wrote, is not a space of kindness but rather one of competition, one-upping, “hostile questions and comments […], microaggressions, petty rivalries, sabotage and backbiting, racism, misogyny, ableism .” (para.3) For us to write collaboratively is to write as friends, to strive to oppose harmful academic patterns of authorial glorification, and to celebrate our friendship. Our approach is one that portrays “knowledge in transition ” and as “not fixed but fluid” (Norris, Sawyer, & Lund, 2012). Thus, we write with a recognition of the partiality and particularity of our accounts yet, in the tradition of feminist engagement, we strive to bring our experiences in dialogue with social, historical, and political contexts and we believe that “autoethnographic work inevitably implicates others” (Chang et al., 2010, p. 130). Since the subject of this chapter is considered sensitive, we strategically excluded many details that could identify “involuntary participants” (Chang et al., 2010, p. 33) of our narratives. Also, because we are drawing on each of our bilingual personal histories, we integrate both Polish and Russian words and phrases into our discussion, accounting for what feminist and queer scholar Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) has depicted as the “wild tongue” of bilingual diasporic identity .

Polina’s Story: “Silences” as Moments of Learning

Before sketching my memories of post-state-socialist schooling, I provide a brief overview of the historical trajectory of sexual education in Russia . The purpose of this overview is to counteract the discourses that imagine post-state-socialist countries as “lagging behind” in the transitioning toward liberal democracy, market economy models, and, by extension, Western ideals of sexual and gendered citizenship. While post-state-socialist countries are framed as slowly “arriving at” Western feminisms, they are neglected in the transnational feminist discourse that positions them to be “in the process of democratization and Europeanization and thus uncritically positioned vis-a-vis the first world” (Suchland, 2011, p. 839). Rather than attempting to present sexual education in Russia as the unfolding of sexual literacy, I draw attention to the contradictory history of public discourses around sex and sexuality. This context is significant for my story as it shows that contemporary silences around sex education, including the ones I experienced in school, are enmeshed with the long history of sexual regulation serving the interests of nation-building. I argue that, although there is no systematic sex education in Russian schools, learning still happens indirectly through workings of evaded and hidden curricula that silence non-normative subjectivities while encouraging the formation of heteronormative futures. Evaded and hidden curricula dovetail with official discourses on Russian nationalism that promote normative, reproductively bound family forms, while pathologizing same-sex relations as detrimental to parenthood and the institution of family (Stella & Nartova, 2015).

In July 1986, Russian and American TV stations broadcasted a space bridge, or “telemost” (телемост), held between American women in Boston and Soviet women in Leningrad. When an American audience-member asked whether Soviet media was saturated with sexualized content in the way US media was, a woman from Leningrad, Lyudmila Ivanova, made a statement that subsequently became a catchphrase: “There is no sex in the Soviet Union” (the ending “on television” was not heard in audience’s laughter). Until this day, her statement is used to mock and pity the Soviet public for its presumed sexual ignorance and deprivation, imagined in opposition to the progressive, sexually liberated Western modernity . Admittedly, there was neither sex education nor commercial representations of sex in the Soviet media; contraception was unreliable and difficult to access; sexually transmitted infections were surrounded by a host of stigmatizing myths. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that the discourses surrounding sexuality were static and flat. After decades of an oppressive Stalinist regime of silence around sexuality, the 1960s and 1970s were marked by some debates among Soviet sociologists around sex education, although a few local sex education experiments were met with opposition by a general public concerned with protecting the “innocence” of youth (Healy, 2014; Kincaid, 1998). At the same time, underground erotic cultures were present in the Soviet Union. Outside of the official discourse, young people of the 1960s and 1970s learned about sexuality through friendship networks, medical sexology textbooks, suggestive countercultural songs, and foreign classic literature such as the works of Zola and de Maupassant (Healy, 2014).

Public discussions around sex education were renewed during perestroika and glasnost of the late 1980s. The closest attempt at establishing a formal sex education was a course called “Ethics and psychology of family life,” which mostly focused on family values and romantic love (Shapiro, 2001). The fall of the Soviet regime, along with the subsequent liberalization of markets, dramatically altered the dynamics of social life, and sex education debates of the 1990s were couched in terms of crisis and urgency. Tumultuous economic conditions led to a sharp rise in sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancies, and cases of sexual violence, making public health the key concern of policymakers. Another matter of interest in sex education debates was shaping, directing, and otherwise normalizing adolescent morality in the context of changing sexual norms driven by a sudden availability of pornographic media, sex shops, strip clubs, and previously suppressed information about “non-traditional” sexual practices. In response to these material and ideological challenges, the Russian Ministry of Education attempted to introduce systematic sex education in secondary schools (Shapiro, 2001). One of the major projects, drafted by Russian experts in consultation with their foreign colleagues from UNESCO and the Netherlands Institute for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, was intended to teach adolescents about reproductive physiology, pregnancy, abortion, safer sex, and “tolerance” of sexual minorities (Shapiro, 2001). Generally, those members of the Russian public who agree that sex education is necessary, tend to think that neither teachers nor parents are presently prepared to deliver this kind of information, so they see medical professionals to be the most suitable for the task (Lukovitskya & Buchanan, 2012). This approach falls within the health pragmatism framework, promising a positive economic and social impact of sex education in the forms of risk management for the benefit of nation-building (Fields, 2008). Yet, despite the ideological promise of the pragmatist framework to encourage responsibilization of young people, the Ministry eventually abandoned the initiative due to intense pressures from religious and conservative groups who accused the project’s authors of corrupting minors and imposing Western values alien to the Russian culture (Shapiro, 2001).

As a student at a municipal secondary school in Yekaterinburg, Russia between the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, I did not have a comprehensive school-based sex education, although fragments of sexual learning were experienced indirectly through discursive and material schooling practices. For instance, during the senior-school years, students had to go through a mandatory health examination carried out by a number of medical specialists, including an ophthalmologist, a neurologist, and a gynecologist. While the public generally welcomed this initiative as a preventative and diagnostic measure, the gynecological exam was commonly met with suspicion and anxiety by girls and their parents alike. Some especially conservative parents were concerned that virginal girls would be “traumatized” by a supposedly “unnecessary” and “humiliating” medical exam, thereby constructing girlhood as desexualized and girls themselves as in danger of moral corruption through acquiring knowledge of their own bodies. Girls had their worries too: usually not because they were struggling to protect their assumed “innocence,” but largely because they had to navigate the schooling and medical systems’ refusal to accept them as legitimate and agentic sexual subjects. Many girls did not exactly know what to expect during a visit to “that kind” of a doctor. Some were not sure whether to disclose their sexual history to a doctor since it was rumored that virgins received a quicker and less invasive exam; others were worried—and often with good reason—that medical confidentiality would be compromised and the details of their sexual health would become known to peers, teachers, and parents.

I remember that after the completing the examinations, the doctor gathered all the girls from our class in her small office and gave us a brief talk. The talk did not cover contraception, STIs, or safer sex practices, a type of knowledge routinely ignored or dismissed in the official public health discourse on the grounds of encouraging “hedonistic attitudes towards sex” (Stella & Nartova, 2015, p. 25) that contravene the reproductive imperative backed by the state. Instead, the doctor said that she was pleased that most girls in our class were virgins. As a figure of authority, she discursively constructed female sexual experience as a site of shame, positioning sexually active girls as outside the boundaries of “normal” adolescence .

Sexuality education is, of course, not limited to women’s reproductive health, but encompasses questions of desires, pleasures and risks, consent and sexual violence, and gender politics more broadly. Classes on Russian and foreign literature were, perhaps, prime educational spaces that could potentially develop individual agency through critical discussions of power dynamics in romantic love. Yet, when the issues related to sexuality surfaced in the assigned texts, they were discussed through euphemismsFootnote 2 or, most often, evaded by a teacher. When it came to learning about the physiological dimensions of human sexuality, the avoidance of discussing sexuality was clear as well. For example, our biology teacher, who was demanding and meticulous about checking homework, never tested our knowledge of a chapter on human reproductive anatomy that was assigned for an independent study.

These silences fall under the “evaded curriculum” (American Association of University Women, 1992), a term referring to a routine dismissal of knowledges and lived experiences that do not align with the normative expectations around schooling. Evaded curriculum is comprised of “matters central to the lives of students and teachers but touched upon only briefly, if at all, in most schools. These matters include the functioning of bodies, the expression and valuing of feelings, and the dynamics of power” (AAUW, 1992, p. 131). The dominant discourses construct sexual knowledge as extraneous to childhood, yet educational documents represent children “as heteronormative subjects with heterosexual futures, even when sexual knowledge is absent in the curricula” (Robinson & Davies, 2008, p. 2), and “hidden curriculum ” becomes a way to promote dominant values outside a formal sex education system (Kendall, 2013).

My following account of experiencing the working of the “hidden curriculum” concerns the heteronormative policing of embodied same-sex affection. Through reconstructing a fleeting episode from my high-school years, I show that, although sex education was absent in the official curriculum, sexual learning was enabled through the “hidden curriculum” that disciplined the body in the attempt to mold heteronormative subjectivities. During my years of schooling, friendship practices of adolescent girls were commonly infused with affective physicality including hugs, touching or braiding each other’s hair, and walking arm in arm. While school culture was rife with asexual erotics of intimate friendships (Przybylo n.d.), the physicality of friendship was not as prevalent among boys who tended to adhere, at least in public, to the norms of “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). While physical closeness might have been a marker of friendship among girls, it was not always interpreted as such by adults. My friend and I once got in trouble for a platonic hug that perhaps lasted a bit longer than it should. A school official passing by was clearly disgusted and enraged by what seemed to her like homoerotic affection. Her authoritative disruption of our intimate affect coded our touch as inappropriately sexual, and my friend and I were assumed to be bearers of deviant, abject desire. Although no sanctions followed this incident, it left me in disbelief and strengthened my distrust of school authority figures. Even though the social space of the school was infused by physical affection of dating couples, regulatory practices emerged once the assumption of heteronormativity was called into question.

Ela’s Story: Polishness, Religiosity, and the Grooming of Nostalgic (Hetero)Poles

Unlike Polina, who emigrated from Russia as a young adult, I emigrated from Poland as a young child and completed all my primary school education in Alberta, Canada in a diasporic Polish community. My elementary education experience, on which I draw below, was in a Polish bilingual school, where instruction took place in both Polish and English. My family, like many others, was part of the “Solidarity Wave” of emigration from the People’s Republic of Poland (Polska Rzeczopospolita Ludowa: PRL) in the 1980s.Footnote 3 The context, especially in the early 1980s, was one of political strife in Poland , with Martial Law declared in 1981 after the infamous protests at the stockyards (“stocznia”) in Gdańsk and the formation of the underground solidarity movement that sought to terminate Soviet occupation of Poland and end state-socialism—ultimately leading to the fall of state-socialism in 1989 (Penn, 2005). Emigration from Poland in this era can be understood as a “political tool of opposition” (Burrell, 2009, p. 2). While it was not impossible to leave the country, the movement of people to and from Poland was not sanctioned and was highly controlled by the authorities. In this context, to leave Poland required traveling through a third country, such as West Germany, Austria, or Italy, often as a refugee. This wave of immigration saw movement to countries such as Canada, the United States, and Australia. Of course immigration to Canada was not easy, and even while Canada changed its criteria for classes of refugees in the late 1970s, it was nonetheless involved in forms of “border imperialism” (Walia, 2013) that required strict medical testing, language competency exams, a complex interview process, age and heteronormative family regulations, proof of savings, and a government or private “sponsor” in order to be considered for entry into the country (Mlynarz, 2008, pp. 65–66).

Upon arrival in Alberta, the school I attended was a mostly horizontal building, which consisted of a cafeteria, two gymnasiums, a school yard, a library, an office area for the administrative staff, a computer lab, gender-segregated washrooms , and classrooms distributed throughout the building. Positioned in a low-income area of the city, the school offered a segregated education system: the English program for students—many of them racialized—living in the vicinity of the school, and a Polish immersion program which supplied mostly white students by school buses from many areas of the city. The bipartite school had two separate names (after two distinct male Catholic figures) to reflect these two schools housed in one building. Part of a Catholic network of schools, the Polish immersion program came into existence in the mid-1980s. During the years I attended the school, elementary- and junior-high-level instruction was provided in Polish, with high-school-level Polish immersion introduced years later at another location.

I want to emphasize the school’s very peculiar connection to Polishness, language, and religiosity. Because the school came into being in the 1980s, during the so-called “Solidarity Wave” of emigration from Poland, of which my family and I were a part, the school managed to retain an ossified relationship to Polishness, to the homeland of Poland, and to the Polish language. For instance, the school still maintains a characteristically 80s’ Polish attachment to Catholic religion as an emblem of anti-Soviet and pro-Solidarity Polishness. Figures of the Polish pope (John Paul II) and the mother Mary are visible throughout the school, both having particularly strong resonance with a Polish Catholicism and the pro-Polish independence push of the 1970s and 1980s. Mary, in particular, plays an iconic role for Polishness. Steeped in misogynist expectations of women’s bodies, Mary speaks to the dual expectation of virginity and motherhood prescribed onto women’s sexualities in service of the Polish nation (“Matka Polka,” i.e., woman-as-mother-as-Poland), (Zaborowska & Pas, 2011, p. 23). This Catholic symbology was oftentimes combined with and embedded within Polish insignia and iconography, such as the Polish white and red flag, or the Polish coat of arms—an eagle with a crown overtop (the crown acting as a comment against Soviet occupation of Poland).

Somehow, to be Catholic in this context is to be truly Polish, or traditionally Polish, and this means to be Catholically Polish. Notably, this form of neo-Right, Catholic-infused Polishness is presently rising in Poland, as was starkly and frightfully demonstrated by recent attempts in 2016 to complete the criminalization of abortion through the proposition to introduce legislation that would make abortion punishable for pregnant women and doctors by up to five years in jail (BBC News, 2016; Tait, 2016). This was fought against vociferously by huge crowds in 2016 through the #czarnyprotest or “Black Protest,” that encouraged women to protest the increased criminalization of abortion through refusing to go to work. At the Polish Albertan school I attended, the way in which Polishness was invoked, inhabited, and inducted into children was also with a strong nostalgia of the Poland left behind (both temporally and spatially)—a mythical Poland of 1980s Solidarity activism. This manifests also at the level of language and a manner of speaking, with a more traditional and outdated Polish language taught at the time I attended, one that was out of pace with the Polish spoken in Poland. In other words, the Polish language, Polishness-as-Catholicism, and a “traditional” Polish orientation, were all attended to at the school, marking a particular relationship to a homeland left behind decades ago, and the willful preservation of Polishness-as-memory among new generations.

Of course, the school is not alone in this diasporic entanglement of nationalism , nostalgic longing for a place left behind, and religiosity. Nostalgic Polishness was exercised through Polish folk dancing troupes, Polish grocery stores, a Polish scouts program (“harcerstwo”), Polish clubs, Polish courses at the university, and Polish Catholic Churches. Upon first arriving in the city, the church was a central place of building Polish social networks and navigating the Canadian context across age levels: for myself as a child, my sisters as adolescents, and my parents as middle-aged adults. The church figured so dominantly in our lives as an extension and expression of Polishness—rendering my family more religious than they were previously in Poland—that my sister’s English as a Second Language journals from those first years read as follows: “we go to church, then we go to school, then we clean the house.” A performance of good daughterhood notwithstanding, our circuit of Polish nestling and Canadian-context adaptation revolved around religiosity and Polishness—the one making the other possible—so much so that the Polish priest frequently appeared as a bachelor-cum-uncle in our family photos. This web of Polish community meant that for a good portion of my childhood and adolescence , I interacted with mostly Polish people and had mostly Polish friends. It has also meant that despite being raised in Canada , I continue to have a Polish accent, Polish identity , language, and an attachment to the particular Polish culture I was raised with.

As we mentioned, already at the elementary-school level, a complex—part intentional, part unintentional—regimen of “teaching it straight” was underway. In the context of my school, “teaching it straight” revolved around particular debts to Polishness and the specific religiosity this seemed to enfold. While few of my teachers were religious fanatics, the Polishness-as-Catholicism regimen served as the backbone of many of the school’s daily unfoldings, rituals, and educational experiences. Sex education during my elementary years consisted of several classes at the grade five level, during which boys and girls were educated in separate classrooms about the events of the reproductive system. In the girls’ classroom, the focus remained on what to expect from our bodies as we were developing into the early stages of puberty, menstruation, and hormonally driven maturation. Searching through my memories, there is nothing distinguishing or revelatory about this experience. Indeed, upon talking to a friend of mine who sat with me in that very same classroom, she recalls nothing of this sex education moment. In Poland, the “silence” around sex education in schools at the time was arguably even more profound. After state-socialism in Poland in the 1990s, sex education was replaced with the explicitly straightening and religiously motivated “Preparation for Life in a Family” courses, which relied on abstinence training and no-sex except procreative sex education (Mishtal & Dannefer, 2010, p. 233). Historically speaking, as state-socialism fell in 1989, women’s access to abortions, available under state-socialism, was rescinded and criminalized in 1993 under a nationalistic Catholic government, inducting also restrictions on contraception (all contraception with the exception of the rhythm method being forbidden by the Vatican, the ruling seat of Catholicism, as sinful) (Mishtal & Dannefer, 2010, p. 233).

Yet, rather than focusing on the predominant silence around sexuality and sex, and the near-total absence of sex education, I find it more fascinating to think about the broader “heterosexualizing process” (Renold, 2000) and heteronormativity (Rich, 1980; Walford, 2000; Walters & Hayes, 1998; Wood, 1984) that took place through a serious indoctrination into gendered norms and their entanglements with Polishness. The division between girl-play and boy-play in my cohort was near total. Sociologist C. J. Pascoe (2007), in her study of homophobia and sexism in a California high school, elaborates on the ways in which boys held the positions of social prestige in the school, developing masculinity through a “fag discourse” deeply hostile to effeminacy, and deeply reliant on a sexist enactment of heterosexuality. I remember a similar social order within my own elementary school: coolness was a currency dealt mostly by the boys. The boys seemed to form a central core structure, a brotherhood, sometimes extending invitations for certain girls to join. Aptitude in sports, and in particular soccer—a sport that has a fan- and practice-based following among the Polish—was a contributing factor to who was understood as cool.

Teachers actively partook in the disciplining of gender and the shaping of a Polish gendered mythology. Polish nationalistic, Catholic, and occasionally post-pagan rituals were key organizing features of the school, and a form of bringing all the classes together with teachers and parents to share in Polish traditions and language. As children, we were encouraged to sing Polish songs, including the national anthem, to recite traditional poetry in Polish (such as Adam Mickiewicz’s “Litwo, Ojczyzno Moja” from Pan Tadeusz; trans. “Lithuania,Footnote 4 My Homeland,” from Sir Thaddeus), and to be on display as Polish children in front of the school community. In recent years, I visited the school for one of these ceremonies to support one of the children in my family as she was seemingly reliving the memories of my own childhood. The occasion was “dożynki,” a Polish post-pagan ceremony akin to Thanksgiving in the United States and Canada . I was most drawn to a song the grade one class performed in Polish, with active singing and gesturing. The song, sung in several verses, described an older man (i.e., “dziad”) returning from work in the fields and demanding that his elderly wife (i.e., “baba”) bake him some bread. After several verses, each reprimanding the woman for not baking the bread correctly, the “dziad” or elderly man proceeds to beat his wife to great laughter from the audience of teachers, other children, and parents. This misogynistic and violent enactment of gender roles signified to the audience a Polish joke of sorts, invoking fantasies of Polish rurality (life on the farm or “na wsi”), poverty, and the presumable inevitability of hitting your wife once in a while if she does not know how to bake. On this occasion, an “informal sexuality curriculum” (Trudell, 1993)—if one that seems fairly explicit—was taught. On the one hand, sex or sexuality was not invoked, but on the other it was conveyed through the particular dynamic of husband and wife, a relationship implicitly sexual, if desexualized in old age. A particular relationship of power was rendered in which several things unfolded: at its simplest, the man works in the field, the woman works in the house; the man provides the final voice of authority on even the most feminized of activities such as baking, demonstrating his extent of control over her life; the woman exists to make the man’s life, even the poor old lecherous man’s life, better; the woman exists in her role as “wife” to the man, a relationship thoroughly defined by a particular heterosexual and sexual presumption as well as by an imbalance of power. Further, the woman and man are presented as occupying separate spheres, existing in conflict rather than, ironically, in solidarity: the “dziad” and “baba” are not friends, not comrades; they are the abettors of each other’s misery; the “dziad” has the right to express his dissatisfaction with life by beating his wife. Aging and rural poverty, it seems, are lightened by having a wife to cook for you and to beat on. All these assumptions, and likely many more were smuggled in, and could be smuggled in under the auspices of Polish humor, entertainment, and light-hearted fun. After all, everyone laughed! I think the enactment of this horrid display of misogyny was made possible due to a referencing of Polish humor and Polish symbolism, a shared sense of Polish origins and traditions, and perhaps even a disappointment in the straightening forces of the educational system. I am not saying that misogyny is more prevalent in Polish, or Polish-Canadian contexts, than say in other Canadian contexts, but rather that everything about the song’s Polish referencing made it a site of light misogynist play, rather than a perceivably real encouragement of gendered violence.

My elementary schooling was also characterized by explicit homophobia, peppered by the derisive use of terms such as “gaylord,” which were in operation in ways similar to what Pascoe (2007) identifies as the “fag discourse,” or a disciplining of masculinity that relies on depreciating effeminacy. Sexual imagery, while smuggled out of the classroom by teachers, was smuggled in by students on heterosexual terms, so that “pencil sharpeners” (“strugawki” or “temperówki”) and “pencils” (“ołówki”) became in grade three, an oblique reference to the thing that happens between boy parts and girl parts during sex, the detailed economy of which was not fleshed out. Yet, as Polina mentions in her account, it is impossible for children to not be homosocial, homoerotic, whether on sexual or asexual terms. For instance, along with my “best friend” at the time (whom I met in grade two and with whom I am still in touch), I began in grade five and six to hold heated competitions around our “ownership” of another girl in our class. During sleepovers, at the playground nearby the school, and throughout class time, there was a simultaneous attraction and repulsion to the body next to mine that manifested at one point in a series of non-love love letters I authored, which declared: “Dear, I am not lesbian (even if you think I am lesbian), but I love you.” In the end, neither my best friend nor I won the competition over the girl in question as she enrolled in a different junior high school than we did. What is interesting, however, is that schooling offered a ground for intimate same-sex affectations, the language for non-straight desires, and the conviction that these desires were uncouth or undesirable in themselves. I learned that I could love a girl, but I should not be a “lesbian.”

After Remembering

The attachment to normative sexuality has intensified in recent years in both Poland and Russia , as evinced by the clawing back of women’s reproductive autonomy and the rights of LGBT people in Russia , as well as Poland’s renewed interest in the total criminalizing of abortion. In many ways, such claw backs are imagined as preserving the nationhood of each respective country, “reinforcing the symbolic and moral distance between ‘European’ sexual democracy and […] national traditions and values” (Stella & Nartova, 2015, p. 32). Our own collaborative autoethnographic piecework looks at our remembrances of childhood memories of navigating sexuality in contexts of sexual silence and straightening without being able to commit to an “it gets better” narrative proudly touted in North American US and Canadian contexts. Writing autoethnographically, diasporically, and queerly, we write with “contradictions and the violences of multiple uprootings, displacements, and exiles” (Gopinath, 2005, p. 4). Refracted through the prism of subsequent adult experiences, our distant memories of childhood are fragmented, frail, and inventive, undoubtedly fueled by imagination and reconstructed through feminist and queer understandings of sexuality, the self, and diaspora. As we discuss throughout, we have chosen to coauthor despite the differences in our narratives, as a way to draw attention to the many ways “nationhood” signifies and is implemented, especially in relation to sexual education. In providing a story of Polish nationhood based in Alberta, Canada , for instance, we reflect on the ways in which educational diasporas navigate the affects and commitments of patriotism and nationalism , forging imagined communities of Polishness geographically separate from, though also in dialogue with, those of “Poland” proper. In this way, our accounts suggest that ideas of “West” and “East” are themselves overinvested with unrealistic boundaries (Said, 1978).

Reconstructing our memories of the everyday, our “ordinary affects” (Stewart, 2007, p. 1) of inhabiting the school space, we draw on the examples from our childhood and adolescent years to reveal continuities between dissimilar contexts sharing legacies of their post-state-socialist pasts. Our experiences point to the absence of formal, school-based sex education and the presence of sexual and gendered learning enacted through evaded and hidden curricula. Whether in Russia or in a diasporic Polish community in Canada , educational institutions are deeply suspicious of formal sex education; their suspicions are animated by the concerns around safeguarding childhood innocence , maintaining a heterosexual presumption , reinforcing gender normativity, and editing out transgender, gender queer, and non-binary gender possibilities. At the same time, as our accounts flesh out, even within an overt insistence on heterosexuality, students, children, and adolescents are presented with possibilities for homoerotic, homosocial, homosexual and homo-asexual intimacies.

As researchers and educators, we are disconcerted by the observation that despite the complexities of gendered discourses in post-socialist landscapes, theorizations of post-socialism are most often missing from curricula on transnational feminisms, as if Eastern and Central Europe, to borrow from Redi Koobak and Raili Marling (2014), is almost “a non-place or non-region” (p. 339). In recent years, punk performances of the Russian band Pussy Riot, street protests organized by the Ukrainian “sextremist” collective Femen, as well as the #czarnyprotest or “Black Protest” against the criminalization of abortion in Poland have been attracting some attention and critique from scholars across Europe and North America. Yet outside of these representational media landscapes, the field of transnational feminist studies has little to say about gender and sexualities in the “second world.” As Magdalena Grabowska (2012) has explored, transnational feminist dialogues primarily feature explorations of power flows between the global North and global South and between the First and Third World, leaving the so-called Second World, including former Soviet-colonized countries, out of the dialogue. Driven by this shared sense of peripherality, we collaboratively used a methodology of “telling it slantwise ” to recreate our memories of sex education, attending to the specificities of gender regimes in diasporic and post-state-socialist contexts. While we caution readers against generalizing from our accounts, we hope that the perspectives offered in this chapter invite new ways of addressing sexuality education within post-state-socialist contexts. Specifically, we invite feminist and queer storytellers and researchers to pay increased attention to Eastern and Central Europe.