CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2009
| Author | Hock, Beáta |
|---|---|
| Title | GENDERED ARTISTIC POSITIONS AND SOCIAL VOICES: POLITICS, CINEMA, AND THE VISUAL ARTS IN STATE-SOCIALIST AND POST-SOCIALIST HUNGARY |
| Summary | The aim of this dissertation has been to explore what factors shaped artistic representations of women and the artistic agendas and self-positioning of individual women cultural producers in Hungary’s state-socialist and post-socialist periods. In using gender as an analytical category within the framework of a carefully conceptualized East/West comparison as well as a state-socialist/post-socialist comparison, the thesis historicizes and contextualizes gender in multidimensional ways. Positing that particular state formations and the dominant ideologies therein interpellate individuals in particular ways and thus might better enable certain subjectivites and constrain others, the thesis sets out to identify the kind of messages that the two different political systems in Hungary communicated to women in general through their political discourses, actual legislation, and social policies. Within this socio-historical framing, the research traces how female subject positions emerge in the respective periods, and turn into speaking positions with women cultural producers in the specific fields of cinema and the visual arts. By carefully exploring the spaces, dynamics, and options available for feminist art production in both periods, the analysis critically reconsiders the alleged absences and presences of feminist art in Hungary. The dissertation contributes to the gendered analysis of the two specific fields of visual culture, which in the case of film studies implies original primary research and theoretical analysis which for the first time applies feminist film theory to Hungarian film production in the second half of the 20th century. The analysis emerges from an interdiscipinary research, both on the level of theoretical inquiry and methodology. It brings together the approaches and insights of a number of scholarly fields (feminist theory, art history, critical art theory, film studies, post-colonial theory, and feminist social science) to explore the degree to which the material and ideological conditions of cultural production impact issues of both content and style as well as authorial positions. To argue a complex case, the thesis employs a range of methodological approaches (critical analysis, literature review, interviews, interpretation of art products). This approach—reading society as a heterogeneous “text” and regarding cultural producers as social subjects—maps the interplay and mutual determinations of social formation, the prevalent codes of art making, and the ideologies operating both within a given society and art world. |
| Supervisor | Zimmermann, Susan |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2009/gphhob01.pdf |
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