The Beauty and the Loser: Cultural Representations of Gender in Late State Socialism

Abstract

Research on gender under state socialism has been predominantly concerned with women in the labor force, including issues such as the double burden, state and private patriarchy, and welfare. Little research has so far been published on the discursive space open for negotiation of gender or the creation of new meanings or positions. Based on a sample of official bureaucratic rhetoric and journalistic and popular texts (including the novels For Reasons Unknown, by Zdena Frýbová, and Memento, by Radek John), this article argues for the existence of diverse discourses of gender in late state socialism, from an unchallenged and unremarked residual patriarchal discourse to protofeminist elements and even alternatives to both. While the dominant emancipatory discourse conserved some traditional preconceptions about the gender order, traditional attributes of femininity also had a resistant, even subversive, potential. The emancipatory discourse fashioned with the facade of traditional femininity opened a textual space for limited protofeminist imagery. Traditional models of masculinity, however, did not have the same resistant or subversive potential but instead were either co-opted by the authoritative ideological discourse for its state-socialist hero or tied up with images of criminal or semicriminal behavior. In the absence of acceptable models of masculinity that would be free from ideological baggage, an alternative discourse of masculinity that places the male body at its center emerges in the textual sample I examine. Imperfect and incomplete as the state-socialist emancipation project may have been, it did broaden the range of discursive positions available to women, although not to men.