New body politic

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This book focuses on feminist and geopolitical understandings of new European societies through the study of Czech and Polish women's art of the 1990s. Two conflicting geopolitical tendencies in Central and Eastern Europe appeared in the 1990s: distancing the communist past as a necessary prerequisite for integration into Western structures (EU and NATO), and embracing communist memories as a tool for promoting wider recognition of the arts in this region. It is precisely there, in the geopolitical inconsistencies of the new Europe, I argue, that new visions of feminist subjectivity can be discerned. In their elucidation of the often forgotten resemblance between communism and capitalism--the notion of productive body (that was worshipped in the past and is now further exploited in the present)--women's art not only interrogates pre- and post-1989 relationships of identity and nation building but also uncovers tacit lines of inclusion and exclusion at the heart of post-communist body politic.