Gender, Literature, and Film in Contemporary East Central European Culture

In her article, "Gender, Literature, and Film in Contemporary East Central European Culture," Anikó Imre discusses gender, literature, and film in Hungary in the context of East Central European national cultures of the 1980s and 1990s. Anikó Imre analyzes the analogous gender structures that underlie both nation and literature in these transitional cultures. She challenges both social science studies of post-communist transitions and studies of East Central European literatures and cultures for their traditional neglect of gendered desire as a political factor. Thereby, Imre adopts a deconstructionist, feminist, and post-colonial approach to Hungarian "postmodernist" literature and film, which, similar to other East Central European cultures, combine an intense interest in the female and the feminine with the refusal of political commitment conveyed in poetic forms. Imre investigates the interrelationships among these features in order to point to a male intellectual culture emasculated by colonization, whose use of "poetic pornography" disguises an effort to defend patriarchal privileges threatened by the effects of the transition. Anikó Imre, "Gender, Literature, and Film in Contemporary East Central European Culture" page 2 of 13 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 3.1 (2001):