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Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the negative portrayal of a technologically advanced home in a popular Czechoslovak movie shot under state socialism to explore the genderedness of home and technology as possibly geopolitically contingent.

Paper long abstract:

Popular culture has probed the concepts of automation, artificial intelligence, and digitization at least since they entered the imagination of the industrial society (cf. Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein) and exploited them both in anticipation (cf. Fritz Lang; Charlie Chaplin; nostalgically Karel Zeman) or as a direct consequence of their technological development. The oft aim of popular culture imaginary has been to grasp the effects of technological developments on “the human condition”/society as a universal experience.

Yet, the expressions and consequences of innovation are always situated and materialized in time and space, and as such convey ideas about different aspects of the human condition embedded in, among other things, geopolitical and ideological contexts. Acknowledging this situatedness, the paper looks into a specific representation of smart home in the Czechoslovak movie “Co je vám, doktore?” (What´s the Matter, Doc?). Filmed in the last decade of state socialism (1984), the movie’s narrative sits well with the return to a bourgeois gender-role assignment evident both in policies and cultural expressions since the 1960s. The state socialist system stressed full-time employment of women as the manifestation of women’s liberation and the movie shows advanced contemporary domestic appliances designed to facilitate women’s work-life balance. The interpretation of the home is negative, as it rids “home” of feminine care and emotionality. The connection between smartening of home, gendered notions of home and care and their reflection in popular culture is what I would like to address in the paper and its discussion.