| Abstract: | This study analyzes the visual representations of women in Bulgaria from the 1950s to the 1980s, as depicted in photographs in the official daily newspaper of the communist party. The study is theoretically informed by feminist theories of media representations and engages specifically with Gaye Tuchman's idea of “symbolic annihilation,” which referred to Western media's condemnation, trivialization, and omission of women in public discourse. However, this analysis adapts Tuchman's theory to the specificities of socialist societies, where women's participation in public life was ideologically mandated. The authors propose the concept of “symbolic glorification” as a correlate to Tuchman's idea, and argue that symbolic glorification was a necessary part of ideological efforts to claim that women's participation in the labor force and political life was a sign of true emancipation. Nevertheless, the visual data reveal that certain aspects of femininity, related to motherhood and sexuality, were symbolically annihilated as a way to make female identities conform to ideological goals. The paper concludes by raising questions about the ways in which the ideologically constructed identities of women during socialism may impact on a feminist agenda after the end of the Cold War. |
