Paper short abstract:

The paper presents an analysis of the normalisation-era Czechoslovak TV series. The aim is to show how the portrayal of gendered home-making plays into the consolidation of a backlash against the extensive gender reform introduced two decades earlier.

Paper long abstract:

As Paulina Bren has shown (1999), the genre of TV series/serials started to play a prominent role in spreading ideological messages to the newly de-politicised Czechoslovak masses after 1968. After the Prague Spring, the genre came to function as a means of presenting the public with model situations and dilemmas that took place in a seemingly timeless space of real-existing socialism. The post-1968 political dynamics triggered further consolidation of the backlash against the extensive gender reform introduced in the 1950s. The backlash has been analysed notably by sociologists (e.g. Hašková, Uhde 2008, Dudová 2012) and from an interdisciplinary perspective Havelková, Oates-Indruchová 2014) with most of the research sources comprising government policies, documents and legislation. In my paper, I argue that these developments may be researched on popular culture representations. Specifically, the paper presents an analysis of the representations of home-making portrayed in a popular TV series Okres na severu (Region in the north). The series features a model Communist Party political representative. To make the model and narrative comprehensive and relatable to the widest possible audience, the story follows the hero at work and at home. It is the gendered emotionality of the hero´s home that I u se to demonstrate specific features of the backlash against the gender reform in the last decades of Czechoslovak socialism. This emotionality is related through mundane tasks in which the senses - and especially taste as cooking and abundance of food play a central role in home-making - play a central role.