Restructuring Gender to Preserve Nationalism: A Criti-cal Discourse Analysis of the Memory Politics of the Bulgarian Totalitarian State in the 1960s
Restructuring Gender to Preserve Nationalism: A Criti-cal Discourse Analysis of the Memory Politics of the Bulgarian Totalitarian State in the 1960s

Summary/Abstract: The article researches changes in gender identities during the period of na-tional communism in the frame of so-called totalitarian modernization. The author analyses both legislation as well as the ways in which notions of nation, heroism and womanhood were constructed in communist oral autobiographies, the memoirs of partisan fighters, the official press and cinema. Despite much pathos about modernization and abundant rhetoric on national and gender emancipation, the Bulgarian totalitarian regime created a fake type of mod-ernization that legitimized many pre-modern mentalities, producing a strain of nationalism close to tribalism and gender relations best described as state pa-triarchy.

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