Party gaze/male gaze: (Re)construction of femininity in post-communist Romanian women's magazines

This thesis examines how post-communist Romanian women's magazines engender a particular representation of women in transition. This is both a challenge to the previous communist ideology which promoted an asexual type of femininity, and the product of a hegemonically masculine culture revived by the reality of the newly born capitalist Romanian society. By means of a feminist semiotic analysis, the study concentrates on visual and textual discourses of femininity in two popular Romanian women's magazines. It concludes that Romanian women's publications during transition advance a concept of femininity constructed through a passivity/power complementariness. On the one hand, constructed images of femininity, according to Western norms, replicate a patriarchal system of values; on the other hand, agency becomes available to women by their own control over their embodied subjectivity, prompted by anxieties accumulated and repressed during the years of communism.