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Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 46.1 (2023)
Intimacy, Censorship, and Gender 
(An Introduction)
Katja Mihurko Poniž, Carmen Beatrice Dut,u
This thematic issue of Primerjalna književnost titled “Intimacy, 
Censorship, and Gender” originates from the international workshop 
“Censoring Intimacy in Women’s Writing and Reading in the Long 
Nineteenth Century” which was held in Ljubljana on August 23–24, 
2022. The workshop explored the ways in which women, writing about 
intimate topics, faced censorship from religious authorities, state ad­
ministration and self­appointed censors (literary mentors, friends, and 
guardians who attempted—sometimes through giving advice, but often 
with more aggressive interventions in the texts—to shape the poetics 
of women writers).
Initially focused only on women’s writing, the editors of this special 
issue have felt that there is need for broadening the perspective and 
context of occurrences of censorship vis­a­vis intimate topics in rela­
tion to authorship and censorship. Consequently, we have added new 
insights to the debate on the censorship of intimacy by including two 
articles examining the works of two male authors. Thus, we aim to 
point out that male authors are also subject to the censorship of inti­
macy when they transgress the boundaries of accepted and established 
concepts of intimacy.
All in all, the articles in this issue explore how censorship is linked to 
intimacy when looked upon within a transnational/transcultural con­
text, as well as investigate how modes of censoring intimacy change 
when they travel from one space to another, from literary centers to lit­
erary peripheries or fringes. They also analyze how the concept of cen­
sorship is related to gender in creative processes: whether it hindered 
them or it was a productive force, a stimulus to creativity, whether it 
led to new literary genres, themes and other literary devices. Moreover, 
the articles reveal the way in which writers have responded to social and 
literary censorious expectations in articulating their gender in relation 
to intimacy, further exploring what the role of family, friends, mentors, 
publishers, editors, and critics is in the process of censoring intimacy. 
Last but not least, the articles focus on modes of linking censorship to 
the canonizing processes.
To start with, Katja Mihurko Poniž and Carmen Beatrice Duțu’s 
review article “Censorship—the Knot that Binds Intimacy and 
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
6
Women’s Writing?” opens this thematic issue with a brief historical 
overview of the intricacies of the relationship between censorship, gen­
der, and intimacy. The authors (who are also the editors of the vol­
ume) further claim that when dealing with women’s writing, censor­
ship could be regarded as “the knot that binds intimacy and women 
writing,” which is merely a paraphrase of Sue Curry Jansen’s view on 
censorship, regarded as “the knot that binds knowledge and power.”
The volume continues with the first case study. “A Complicit 
Reading Strategy: Exposing Censored Themes of Intimacy in Swedish 
Alfhild Agrell’s Räddad” is a seminal text by Birgitta Lindh Estelle who 
boldly proposes an ethical reading by taking the specific socio­historic 
censorship situation of the Swedish female playwright Alfhild Agrell 
into account. Through multiple textual references, the author adopts 
a complicit reading strategy in order to expose silenced themes of inti­
macy in the gendered period­specific censorship situation of the 1880s 
in Sweden.
Zita Kārkla and Eva Eglāja­Kristsone take a militant stance in 
“Her Story is Like a Weed: Censoring the Vulnerability in Women’s 
Writing.” Focusing on the example of Latvian writer Anna Rūmane­
Ķeniņa (1877–1950), the authors’ outspoken intention is to broaden 
the feminist scholarship on women writers by exploring the relation­
ship between women’s writing, intimacy, vulnerability and censorship 
and rediscovering and canonizing women’s writing through the Latvian 
literary culture, in the early twentieth century.
In “Becoming a (Slovenian)  Poet at the Turn of the Nineteenth 
Century: Male Censorship of Vida Jeraj’s Poetry” Alenka Jensterle 
Doležal approaches the theme of censorship from a performative view­
point, discussing the case­study of the Slovenian woman writer Vida 
Jeraj (1875–1932). The article is an analysis of the gendered censor­
ship discourse visible in the correspondence between her and the male 
authors in her first period of writing—with great impact on the poetic 
strategies of the young promising poet.
The same performative approach is proposed by Carmen Beatrice 
Duțu, Roxana Patraș and Antonio Patraș in the article “On Becoming 
‘Princesse Bibesco’: The Intimacy of Modern Identity, Between the Self 
and the World.” The authors present reasons and contexts of the exclu­
sion of the Romanian­French writer Martha Bibescu (1886–1973) 
from the Romanian national literary canon. The authors’ specific aim 
is to move away from the enduring narrative of censorship in Martha 
Bibescu’s case and to propose her as a candidate figure for a transna­
tional literary canon forging a specific, modern, intimate écriture.
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Katja Mihurko Poniž, Carmen Beatrice Dut,u:     Intimacy, Censorship, and Gender (An Introduction)
In line with the more recent “new censorship” theories, the prob­
lems of self­censorship are brought into discussion by Cecilia Annell 
who, in “Unspeakable Desire? Norm Breaking Strategies by Swedish 
Women Authors of the 1880s,” explores strategies that nineteenth­cen­
tury Swedish women authors invented to handle censorship when writ­
ing about intimacy and sexuality. The author thus reveals the fact that 
the dichotomy of the virtuous and the sinful woman has functioned as 
a strongly self­censoring factor for women authors throughout history 
in their writing on intimacy, desire, and sexuality.
On the other side of the spectrum, Natalia Panas’ “Double Censored 
Freedom? Cultural Memory’s Censorship of Intimacy Writing in Moj 
život by Maga Magazinović” discusses the case of the Serbian woman 
writer Maga Magazinović (1882–1968), a free thinker and a feminist 
advocate. Moreover, the article underlines that this perspective was reg­
ulated by two censorship systems in cultural memory: that of moral/
erotic nature in Kingdom of Yugoslavia and ideological/political one in 
Socialist Yugoslavia.
Elena Lindholm’s article “The Censorship of a Closeted Spain: The 
Case of Elena Fortún (1886–1952)” focuses on how self­censorship and 
state censorship have shaped the literary legacy of the Spanish author of 
children’s books, Elena Fortún. The homosexual closet is presented as a 
key concept for understanding the impact of censorship on the work of 
a lesbian writer such as Fortún who has contributed to various narra­
tives of Spanish femininity over the course of almost a century.
Irena Selišnik’s article “Self­censorship, Family Interpretation and 
the Influence of Legitimate Narrative on Autobiographies of Women” 
presents a comparative analysis of autobiographies of three Slovenian 
women writers and feminists: Elvira Dolinar, Minka Govekar and 
Marica Bartol. Selišnik explores their interpretation of life story together 
with the thematization of their narrative as well as the narrative style. 
Thus, Selišnik reveals how the authors self­censored themselves, some­
times voicing and sometimes keeping silent about important life deci­
sions.
The issue of homoeroticism and censorship is addressed in Andrej 
Zavrl’s article “Who are the Addressees of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (in 
Slovenian)?” which discusses the translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets. 
The author contends that in the case of two recent translations into 
Slovenian, one cannot speak of censorship in the classical sense of hid­
ing or deleting undesirable content. Rather, in these translations of the 
sonnets, among other things, a seemingly opposite effect may be traced, 
as the lyric subject addresses a man in many more sonnets than in the 
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
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original, which is the opposite of what one would expect in the case of 
censorship. Conditionally, one could perhaps speak of a ‘censorship’ of 
the gendered or fluid nature of the source texts.
The relation between male authorship, intimacy and censorship 
is explored by Marijan Dović in “Burning Erotika and Ivan Cankar’s 
Revolution in Slovenian Poetry.” The author discusses the reception of 
Ivan Cankar’s poetry collection Erotika (1899), focusing on the reasons 
for the infamous purchase and burning of the collection ordered by the 
Bishop of Ljubljana, Anton Bonaventura Jeglič. Dović points out that 
around the turn of the century in the Habsburg Monarchy, books were 
no longer subject to state censorship, however, this particular book was 
nevertheless subject to a special kind of informal censorship that actu­
ally benefited the author by putting him in the spotlight—as a harbin­
ger of the erotic revolution in Slovenian poetry.
***
The editorial work on this special issue has been funded by the 
Slovenian Research Agency in the framework of the research proj­
ect “Transformations of intimacy in the literary discourse of Slovene 
‘moderna’” (J6­3134, hosted at the University of Nova Gorica) and 
the research project “Slovenian Writers and Imperial Censorship in 
the Long Nineteenth Century” (J6­2583, hosted at the ZRC SAZU 
Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies).