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‘A Woman from a Newspaper’: A New Face for Ideology and Old Habits story of the photograph was intentionally arranged and performed in front of the camera producing the image in accordance with a particular idea and vision. Here it is useful to follow Peter Burke’s (2001) understanding of the Lacanian ‘gaze’, which assumes that despite the photographer’s intentions, the act of photography is always influenced by dominant patterns of perception. In the case of ‘a women from a newspaper’ the ‘gaze’ is ideologically twofold: it is male and it is embedded in the doctrine of building a new socialistic state. It classifies women as objects of narrative conventions, which include images dominated by stereotypical themes and activities needed for constructing ideological foundation of the new post-war reality. However, most of the visual stories in the newspapers do not destroy either the expectations or the narrations locked in the formula of seeing, telling and producing particular contents concerning women. ‘The narrations connected to the women’s images in socialism, solely preserved the visual, as well as the apparent equality and freedom. It is rather difficult to speak about the profound transformation of the situation of women in society, which was based on the principle of ‘indispensible commitment’ and excluded individual social progress for women as well as their possibilities of self-realisation (see Papi¢ 1989). “The Working Woman’: An Unnecessary Feminism? The social roles of women in socialism were controlled and organised in accordance with general expectations and dominant ideology. One has to agree that ideologies may, and often are, defined as collective representations for social groups as well as axiomatic assumptions about such representations (see van Dijk 2006). Therefore, ideologies structure not only identities, aims, norms, values and practices, but also the internal relations of societies, groups and classes. Additionally, ideologies also encompass gender differences, including their particular socio-cultural interests, imaginaries and consciousness. The category of gender, entangled in the history of socialist realism, played a significant role in the socio-cultural interpretation of the world, in which ideology was a vehicle for exerting pressure on particular individuals or social groups and “a specific form of thinking, which although does not have any cognitive value, rationalizes ‘anachronic’ practices in particular situation” (Mannheim 1936 cited in Wioch 2009: 34). Indoctrination and mystification, as derivatives of ideology and inseparable components of real life, supported the process of construction and reproduction of meanings, which eventually served the particular interests of specific groups and indicated their social and historical values, simultaneously making them privileged within the social system of power. However, it does not mean that one should reduce the analysis to merely totalising interests of a chosen social group. What is crucial here is the boundary ‘visible’ in socially situated thinking, solid divisions and durable judgments, which often precludes one part of the society (for example women) from realising their personal aims. 397
