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CONSTRUCTING SLOVAK WOMEN ON SCREEN: COMPARATIVE AND DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVES IN CZECH CINEMA
Abstract
This paper analyses the representation of Slovak women in Czech cinema from the interwar period to the present, with a particular focus on transformations after the 1993 dissolution of Czechoslovakia. Combining comparative imagology with feminist film theory and postcolonial perspectives, the study traces recurring imagotypes - from the folklorized, natural girl of the 1930s and the implicitly “Slovak” heroines of the New Wave, through the eroticized figures of the Normalization era, to the explicitly Slovak migrant characters that appear in post-1993 mainstream films. By examining representative works across these periods, the paper shows how Slovak female characters function as key sites for negotiating Czech national identity. Their portrayals, oscillating between erotic “wamp” and self-sacrificing mother, contribute to broader debates on gender representation by revealing how cinematic femininity becomes a metaphor for ethnic and geopolitical Otherness. The study argues that post-1993 Czech cinema uses Slovak womanhood to stabilize symbolic oppositions between West and East, thereby shaping contemporary Czech–Slovak cultural relations.
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References12
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