Visual and material history of sexualisation

• Department of History

The Visual and Material History Working Group and the Queer and Feminist Studies Interdisciplinary Working Group host a joint session at the crossroads of gender history and material culture.

This workshop aims to conduct a reflection on how to integrate visual and/or material sources within the study of gender and sexuality. This workshop will be dedicated to socialist and post-socialist Poland and chaired by Professor Benno Gammerl.

Dr Anna Dobrowolska (Max Weber Fellow, EUI) will present a paper entitled In Search of Socialist Erotica. Nudity, Popular Culture and Sexualized Advertising in Late State-Socialist Poland where she explores the normalisation of sexualised objects in the everyday life of men and women living in the heteropatriarchal state-socialist Poland and its posterity in the 1970s and contemporary cultural memory. Then, Marta Chmielewska (PhD researcher, EUI) will share her work on Socialist and post socialist gender and materiality: the history of bra production in Poland" where she emphasizes the interconnection between labour conditions and gender norms. By focusing on the case study of the Glowno’s bra production, she highlights how women’s bodies were perceived, commodified, and nationalised in product styles and selling lingerie marketing. 

Due to restricted capacity please register for this event in order to get a seat or the ZOOM link. For more information, do not hesitate to contact Ana Struillou, Moises Fernandez Cano, Elisa Chazal, Isabelle Riepe.