Collective memory is a central medium for connecting the past, present, and future. It is an indispensable fragment of any (imagined) community and thus significantly influences the construction of gender-specific habitus. However, since we cannot directly access the past, media remains the primary source of information for collective memory. Through the mediation of specific narratives and the use of non-neutral rhetorical practices, they create particular flows of history and memory. Consequently, patriarchal and androcentric media representations of gender leave their mark on the socio-cultural organisation of communities. In this master's thesis, I focus on the role of gender as a category of collective memory. The fundamental concepts of the thesis are collective memory, ideology, habitus, power, and knowledge. The aim is to fill the gap in academia regarding the gendered collective memory. Thus, at the end of the thesis, based on a critical multimodal analysis of seven museum exhibitions and five primary school history textbooks, criteria are formulated to serve as a basis for discussing the gendered collective memory. We identified seven parameters that point to gendered collective memory – representations of professions and leisure activities, the use of quotations, anonymity, photographic approaches, the flow of narrative, and placement on the continuum between heroism and suffering. Thus, collective memory is recognised as an important actor in the construction of gender ideologies and habitus in the present.
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