Advertising, Sex, and Post-Socialism: Women, Media, and Femininity in the Balkans

(Paperback)

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Advertising, Sex, and Post-Socialism explores the role of advertising and the consumption it promotes in changing cultural perceptions of sex and femininity across the Balkan region. Elza Ibroscheva theorizes how the marketing of gender identities that has taken place in the years of post-socialist transition has fundamentally affected the social, economic, and political positioning of women. Advertising is one of the major factories of cultural signification, and as such, serves as the most ubiquitous vessel of global norms of gendered selves. In addition, advertising serves as a literacy tool for learning the grammar of consumption, studying the ideologies of femininity and sex before and after the collapse of the socialist project, as well as the prevailing portrayals of femininity in advertising in present day Bulgaria. This book provides a revealing look at the mechanisms of how post-socialist norms of sexual behavior are being engendered, and what role media play in this transformative process.

Reviews

Well-written, occasionally funny, yet scholarly sound, this Bulgarian story written with an insider's voice will dismantle for the reader myths about post/socialism and femininity, while offering alternative and surprising explanations and validations of human being's infinite capacity for imagination and survival. -- Denise Roman, University of California, Los Angeles
Ibroscheva provides the reader with a remarkable and comprehensive look at the media in the post-socialist world of Eastern Europe. . . .In a very real way . . . the book offers a mirror of both East and West and a sobering account of gendered advertising, sales, politics, and people. * Communication Research Trends *

Author Bio

Elza Ibroscheva is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of Mass Communications, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.