Advertising, Sex, and Post-Socialism (eBook)

The book traces the evolution of gender ideologies in the Balkans, through emancipating women’s roles during socialism and into the proliferation and normalization of hyper-sexualized images of women in advertising and other media in the post-socialist transition. Drawing on a media-centered cultural/critical approach to understanding the changing role of advertising in post-socialist societies and its influence on gender identities, the book offers a unique contribution to global media studies and the broader discipline of gender and communication.

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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.