On January 15, at 7 pm Tbilisi time, the biweekly research colloquium of the Institute for Social and Cultural Research, Ilia State University, will host Salome Tsopurashvili with a talk on her book: “From Victimhood to Empowerment: Representing Women in 1920s Soviet Georgian Cinema”, which was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2025.
Abstract:
Employing the discourse analysis, postcolonial perspectives and psychoanalytical feminist film theories, the book analyses women’s representations in the Georgian State Film Industry’s most important films of the 1920s. In the light of Bolsheviks’ preoccupation and endeavour to improve “woman question”, the book surveys to what extent women’s screen images were emancipated and what the functional meaning of this emancipation was in the given context; how the new ideals of the New Soviet woman were inscribed in the period’s films and how these ideals were combined with Georgian nationality.
The discussed themes include: the female body’s symbolic function in the aspects of class dichotomy and ethnic hierarchies; the embodiment of the “Oriental other” of the Russian colonial imagination and its subsequent dismantling in the context of the Caucasus’s de-Orientalization on the screen; the characteristics embodied by the “heroine” and “villain” of the new social order-the New Soviet Woman and the NEPwoman; and women’s transformation within the revolutionary setting during the decade.
Bio:
Salome Tsopurashvili is an assistant-professor in Gender and Film Studies at Ilia State University. She holds her PhD from the International Program in Gender Studies at Tbilisi State University. At different times she was a visiting researcher at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), University of Vermont (USA), Lady Margaret Hall at the University of Oxford (UK),New Europe College (Romania), St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford (UK).
The event will take place in English via Zoom. Registration is required.
To register please follow this link.
Book cover: photo from Kote Mikaberidze’s film “My Grandmother” (1929), National Archive of Georgia. Design: Eleanor Rose.