Though there has been much research on the incomplete emancipation project of state socialism in East and Central Europe, very little has been published on how the state and its institutions conceived of gender as a concept. This book seeks to understand if and how this conceptualization developed in the second half of the twentieth century, and what impact it had on everyday life and on culture. This study moves beyond the dichotomous gender perspectives and towards a nuanced understanding of the diverse discursive negotiations, agendas, actors and agency involved in state-socialist gender practices. Including a detailed case study on Czechoslovakia, contributors explore these issues in a series of independent, but collaboratively developed studies, placing their research in the context of other East Central European countries. The studies collected in the volume bring to light fresh material and consider it from the combined perspective of current gender theory and internal ideological dynamics of state socialism, breaking new ground in gender theory, cultural theory and studies of state socialism.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars of gender studies, socialism, Cold-War politics and Eastern European politics and culture.
Introduction 1. Expropriated voice: transformations of gender culture under state socialism; Czech Society, 1948-1989 Hana Havelková and Libora Oates-Indruchová Part One: Gender as a social category 2. The three stages of gender in law Barbara Havelková 3. Women’s organizations in the Czech lands, 1948–1989: an historical perspective Denisa Nečasová 4. State approaches to homosexuality and non-heterosexual lives in Czechoslovakia during state socialism Věra Sokolová 5. Between femininity and feminism: negotiating the identity of a ‘Czech socialist woman’ in women’s accounts of state socialism Kateřina Zábrodská Part Two: Gender as a symbolic category 6. The body of the nation: the Czechoslovak Spartakiades from a gender perspective Petr Roubal 7. Dispositives of silence: gender, feminism, and Czech literature between 1948 and 1989 Jan Matonoha 8. The Beauty and the Loser: cultural representations of gender in late state socialism Libora Oates-Indruchová 9. The feminist style in Czechoslovak cinema: the feminine imprint in the films of Věra Chytilová and Ester Krumbachová Petra Hanáková 10. The AIDS-ed perestroika: discourses of gender in negotiations of ideological consensus in late-socialist Czechoslovakia Kateřina Kolářová