Selling the Post-Communist Female Body

Portrayals of women and gender in Bulgarian advertising

Bibliographic Data

ID12689502
AuthorsElza Ibroscheva (corresponding author)
Year2012
Volume13
Issue3
Pages443-462
Publication date2012-08-15
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Media Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1468-0777 • E-ISSN: 1471-5902
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14680777.2012.708515
OpenAlexW1506549233
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited24

During the years of the Cold War, propaganda by both sides of the divide was waged on every front. That propaganda prominently featured images of communist women, dressed in white lab coats, wearing construction hats, flying planes, and lacking any sense of sexuality. It also effectively created the most visually recognizable and ubiquitous symbols of communism in the West—the drab communist woman. Today, Eastern European women are anything but the asexual heroines of the communist past. In an attempt to aggressively break away from an ideologically oppressive past, young Eastern European women have adopted a new highly sexualized identity. Advertising, which boomed in the years of the post-communist transition, has offered an ideal venue for the display of this sexuality; and while this trend of exaggerated sexuality in advertising is certainly not a new one, it is a particularly fast and glaringly "normalized" trend in Eastern Europe with potentially, dangerous consequences. By focusing on the advertising campaigns of the Bulgarian vodka brand Flirt, this essay explores how women are portrayed and how these portrayals are marketed in an attempt to offer a revealing look at the mechanisms of constructing post-communist gender identities. Keywords: womenEastern Europeadvertisingsexualitytransition Notes 1. In this essay, I refer to the authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe interchangeably as communism and socialism. The terms remain in currency when discussing the changes in the region and are often used as though they are transposable. In my use of these labels, I subscribe to the contingency and open-endedness of change in the post-communist transition. Similarly, I use the East/West dichotomy simply as a heuristic device in order to illuminate differences. They are in no way absolute distinctions as variations within and similarities between continue to prevail through the region. 2. Part of the argument stems from the fact that despite the obvious cultural differences between the countries of the Eastern bloc, Eastern and Central European countries for a long time were conveniently clumped together into one uniform cluster, based upon the universally upheld ideologies of the socialist order. Similarly, while the Soviet Union was the locus of communist ideologies that translated across the entire region, it must be noted that the countries of the Eastern bloc did not always have a uniform response to the policies commissioned by Moscow and responded to them with varying degrees of compliance. In the case of Bulgaria, which was known as the closest satellite state to the Soviets and was often referred to as the "16th Republic" by its own leaders, the official party line rarely veered away from the one issued by the Soviet ideologues, and when it did, it did so rather hesitantly and timidly, compared to the Central European countries, for example. Therefore, I argue, Bulgarian policies were significantly impacted by the direct orders of the Soviet Union and exhibited striking similarities to political and cultural developments in Soviet Russia. 3. Many feminist scholars, and particularly so in transnational film and media studies, have argued for the need to broaden the scope of critical examination by cutting across the West/non-West as well as North/South divide by offering critical interactions that include often neglected voices addressing the post-socialist second world and the global south. This argument was powerfully articulated by Katarzyna Marciniak, Aniko Imre and Áine O'Healy (2007 Marciniak, Katarzyna, Imre, Aniko and O'healy, Áine, eds. 2007. Transnational Feminism in Film and Media, New York: Palgrave. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 2009 Marciniak, Katarzyna, Imre, Aniko and O'healy, Áine. 2009. Transcultural mediations and transnational politics of difference. Feminist Media Studies, 9(4): 385–390. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) who introduced the term "transnational feminist media studies" in order to address the challenges posed by the cultural shifts and changing gender dynamics in the face of globalization (see also, Katarzyna Marciniak, 2006 Marciniak, Katarzyna. 2006. Alienhood, Citizenship, and the Logic of Difference, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]). The focus on the post-socialist region is particularly compelling, as this area of the world is frequently absent from discussions on global trends in feminist media studies. 4. According to this 2010 study, which looked at eighty-thousand fifteen-year-olds in twenty-three countries, social control of leisure time and lack of alcohol marketing behind the Iron Curtain had seemed to keep adolescent drunkenness down. But in the 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, increasingly aggressive marketing of alcohol likely helped contribute to an increase in adolescent alcohol use during that decade. 5. The study, known as ELSA, was a project initiative of STAP (the National Foundation for Alcohol Prevention in the Netherlands), supported by the European Council and released in 2007. It collected data from twenty-four European countries, including Bulgaria, in order to assess and report on the enforcement of national laws and self-regulation of the advertising and marketing of alcoholic beverages in EU member states. This study was also the first of its kind for Bulgaria since its accession to the European Union

Advertising · Business · Communism · Demographic economics · Economics · Political science · Politics · European history and politics · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Law · Psychology