Selling the Post-Communist Female Body

Abstract

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.

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