Visegrad Lecture Series

Within and Outwith Law: Queer Cultural Capital Under State Socialism

by Kata Benedek (independent researcher)

Kata Benedek examines the intersection of censorship and queer cultural production in state-socialist contexts. Censorship is often treated as a catch-all term for various constraints encountered by cultural actors, yet a more nuanced differentiation is necessary—distinguishing, for instance, between existing within a culture of censorship and being actively censored, as well as between non-dominant and marginalized themes.

Having previously established that no legally codified or systematically practiced censorship specifically targeted queer representation in state-socialist Hungary, Benedek seeks to propose new theoretical and methodological models to reassess the situational dynamics of queer artifacts within state-socialist socio-cultural fields. Building on Miklós Haraszti’s concept of an expanding controlled culture of censorship and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital, she introduces the notion of queer cultural capital as a framework for understanding the positioning of queer cultural production under state socialism. This concept encompasses both the knowledge of queerness and the contemporaneous queer episteme, which enabled individuals to navigate and capitalize on their queer knowledge within the given political, societal, and cultural fields.