The gendered language of postsocialist street posters
Joel Morton
St Lawrence University, USA
Using projected images of posters I have collected from eastern Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland since the summer of 2000, my presentation analyzes the gendered visual/text language of commercial and political street posters of postsocialist central Europe. The language of the posters reveal variations of the "reinvention of gender" (Kosinsky & Nickel 2003) rapidly taking place during the postsocialist era. For example, the poster/texts display strategies of corporate capitalism in using gender to re-fashion the consumer/consuming subjectivities of their target audiences in each country. The posters also include examples of explicitly political works, both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic, the latter including several from Centrum Praw Kobiet and the Federation for Women and Family Planning in Warsaw. The posters and other street ephemera to be used in my presentation are drawn from my (growing) collection of postsocialist street ephemera. The initial stages of an on-line exhibition of the collection may be viewed at http://gallery.stlawu.edu.