GENDER AND IDEOLOGY: WOMEN ON POSTAGE STAMPS IN SERBIA: 2006-2018

Abstract

In 2000 certain democratic changes happened in Serbia. They instilled hopes that everyday life will be more democratic in every segment, especially when gender equality is concerned (equality for the different, that is, women). The degree to which a society is democratic could be measured in different ways. One of them is the presence of visuals (drawings, etc.) or presence of any other form of material culture.The aim of this paper is to examine the degree of democratic changes in multinational, multi-confessional and multilingual Serbia during the last decade as it relates to the absence of linguistic codes, and using postage stamps to depict women (2006-2018). The corpus consists of all the postage stamps printed during the period, but only those depicting women were analysed. The analysis of the text on postage stamps opens up a theoretical question “What is text”?We here introduce the criterion of ‘implied knowledge’ as a measure for the understanding of the meaning of text on a stamp, more accurately, as a measure of the presence of an implicit discrimination towards notable women.The results reveal the following: 1. there are only several women who got the privilege to be presented on a postage stamp in this period; 2. all of them originate from the Serbian culture and none from other national communities. This clearly shows that the ideological decision is in question.