Guerrilla male libidos in Mircea Nedelciu’s fiction: from Gender to Genre in Eastern European context

Abstract

Writing under Ceauşescu’s communist regime, Romanian author Mircea Nedelciu seems to fictionally exploit the politically subversive potential of the male libido as emphasized by the imagery of the Western sexual revolution, through a gallery of male protagonists recurrently exhibiting unconventionally libertine and misogynistic erotic behaviors. However, his underlying ethical commentary regarding the issue actually generates a theoretical standpoint that might not only be significant for a regional (re)interpretation of “sexistentialism” as a (counter-)cultural topos in the Eastern European literature of the 1980s, but an interesting contribution to the nowadays renewed debates concerning the cultural achievements of the Sixties’ sexual liberation as well.