Advertising, Sex, and post-Socialism

Advertising, Sex and Post-Socialism explores the role of advertising and the consumption it promotes in chancing cultural perceptions of sex and feminity across the Balkan region. Elza Ibroscheva theorizes how the marketing of gender identities that has taken place in the years of the 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 plays in this transformative process.