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 ...

Challenging Images of Women and the Media: Reinventing Women’s Lives, edited by Theresa Carilli and Jane Campbell, collects fifteen articles addressing the status of women through an examination of depictions of women in the media. This in-depth study shows how mixed messages from the media muddle attempts at breaking the “glass screen,” causing women to constantly question their role in global culture. With cake ads followed by diet commercials, the media’s depiction of women is both conf...

Thirty years after Bulgaria’s democratic breakthrough, this book provides a “balance sheet” of the country’s democratic institutions through a number of interdisciplinary contributions. The volume is organized around three themes—democratic institutions, civil society, and European Union (EU) processes—and examines such topics such as voting, political parties, populism, media, civil society organizations, identity, and the rule of law. While the contributors argue that Bulgaria’s democrac...

Although women constitute half of the world's population, their participation in the political sphere remains problematic. While existing research on women politicians from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada sheds light on the challenges and opportunities they face, we still have a very limited understanding of women's political participation in emerging democracies.Women in Politics and Media: Perspectives From Nations in Transition is the first collection t...