Author: Fojtová, Simona

Source: Aspasia, Volume 3 , pp. 161-188(28)

Abstract:

Drawing on feminist conceptualisations of the body, this essay analyses Iva Pekárková's novel, Truck Stop Rainbows (published as Péra a Perutě [Feathers and wings] in 1989, translated into English in 1992), to show how this contemporary Czech writer challenges the metaphor of the female body as a container through which communist propaganda in Czechoslovakia officially sanctioned and established a normative female identity in maternal, economic and civic functions. I seek to demonstrate how Fialka, the female protagonist who lives under the Czechoslovak communist regime of the 1980s, critiques discursive and epistemic formations that conceptualised the female body as a vessel for reproduction and labour and denied the female body the authority to function as a source of knowledge. Striving to spotlight the body in its cognitive role, I argue for an understanding of the body not as an instrument of knowledge or a neutral medium that enables knowledge production but, rather, as a condition of the possibility of knowing.

Keywords: BODY; COMMUNISM; CZECH WOMEN'S LITERATURE; GENDER; KNOWLEDGE; RESISTANCE

DOI: 10.3167/asp.2009.030108

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