EBook Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women's booka

Mothers Comrades and Outcasts in East German Women s Film merges feminist film theory and cultural history in an investigation of women s films that span the last two decades of the former East Germany Jennifer L Creech explores the ways in which these films functioned as an alternative public sphere where official ideologies of socialist progress and utopian collectivism could be resisted Emerging after the infamous cultural freeze of 1965 these women s films reveal a shift from overt political critique to a covert politics located in the intimate problem rich experiences of everyday life under socialism Through an analysis of films that focus on what were perceived as women s concerns marital problems motherhood emancipation and residual patriarchy Creech argues that the female protagonist served as a crystallization of socialist contradictions By framing their politics in terms of women s concerns these films used women s desire and agency to contest the general problems of social alienation and collectivism and to re imagine the possibilities of self fulfillment under socialism Mothers Comrades and Outcasts in East German Women s Film New Directions in National Cinemas .