Fragments of the Body: Woman in Socialist Screen Advertising

Abstract

The advertising of state socialism is often referred to as a paradox or oxymoron, yet it has produced images that shaped the consumer imagination and consumer values of socialist society. One of the critical topics in Czechoslovak socialist television advertising discourse was using an actor or a model. The socialist values of leveled consumption refused to promote consumption for property and create social distinctions through advertising and consumption. These beliefs fundamentally shaped the image of the body in socialist advertising. In this text, therefore, I discuss how the morality of socialist advertising, together with the evolving gender discourse, supported the methods of hiding, masking, or fragmenting the female body in socialist screen advertising. Based on the analysis of a vast corpus of advertisements, I follow the development of this trend from the 1960s to the 1980s, compare screen advertising with other types of advertising media, and argue that the reason for restraint in the explicit representation of the female body was, among other things, the specific hierarchy of the media in the geography of the consumer imagination of socialist Czechoslovakia.

Keywords:

• Socialist advertising
• gender
• visual culture
• consumer imagination
• body image

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund project ‘Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World’ (reg. no.: CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).

Notes on contributors

Lucie Česálková

Lucie Česálková is an Associate Professor at the Department of Film Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, and an editor at Prague’s National Film Archive. In her research she focuses on nonfiction and documentary film, educational and advertising film, on film exhibition and moviegoing. Her research outputs appeared in journals such as Film History, The Moving Image, Memory Studies, Journal of Popular Culture, or Studies in Eastern European Cinema, as well as in edited volumes (Films that Sell. Moving Pictures and Advertising (Palgrave 2016); Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in a Global Context (Palgrave 2018); Animation and Advertising (Palgrave 2019); The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History (Routledge 2019).