ASEEES panel: visual culture

[Karla .]

Cynthia Paces and I are looking for a third presenter and a discussant for a
panel on visual culture. Both of our papers deal with Czech visual
culture--specifically imagery about women--in the early 20th century. We are
open to either another Czech paper or to one that examines a related theme
in visual culture elsewhere. (See below for our abstracts.) Please contact
me at calypsospots at gmail.com if you are interested in joining us.

Karla Huebner


*Cynthia Paces, "Visions of motherhood in the Czech fin-de-siecle"*
Prague’s motto is the “Mother of Cities”. As Czech nationalists continued to
make
their capital a Slavic, rather than a German, city, they turned to this
image of Prague
as a maternal, nurturing center of Czech culture. Simultaneously,
middle-class
Czech women were told that their mothering practices were central to the
nation’s
mission. This paper will compare the images directed at new mothers about
how
to care for their infants, as represented in the popular mothering guides of
the era,
with the nationalist art now decorating the Municipal House, the new Old
Town hall,
and public squares of Prague.

*Karla Huebner, “Dívky & Panenky: Interwar Czech Images of Prostitution and
Sexual Availability”*

Despite a growing body of research on late-nineteenth-century Czech women,
and newly emerging data on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Czech
prostitution, visual imagery of prostitution and female sexual availability
in the Czech lands remains unstudied. In this paper, I inquire how First
Republic Czechoslovak cartoons and fine art envisioned prostitutes and other
sexually available women. How pervasive was such imagery? Who was its
audience? How did it relate to other kinds of depictions of Czech women? How
did it differ from German and Austrian imagery? I will particularly examine
the sexually oriented cartoons published in the humor magazine *Trn* (“Thorn”),
as they strongly contrast with the imagery of presented in most Czech
periodicals, which emphasized attractive and up-to-date young women whose
sex appeal was implicit rather than explicit and whose antics were cute,
never sluttish.

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