Метафорите на болестта и конструирането на човешкото тяло по време на комунистическия режим в България
Metaphors of Illness and the Construction of the Human Body under Communist Regime in Bulgaria

Summary/Abstract: Based on the famous theory of Susan Sontag about the metaphorization of illness the article focuses on different usages of the images of illness in the socialist discourses. Its main purpose is to analyze these usages of the metaphors of illness which contribute to the constructing of a bodily ideal that serves as a normative model intended to punish the deviations from communist norms. In its first part the research considers the early socialist bond between the illness and body pleasures and entertainments which are represented in terms of rottenness, degeneration, tortuosity. This bond is conceptualized in the context of the early communist attempts of constructing the bodily ideal of a body-machine – the notion of a hard-working, cheerful and healthy body but at the same time – a body sterilely purified from all intimate desires and impulses. The metaphors of disease are incorporated in this conceptual paradigm in order to give an element of organic naturalness of the model of body-machine as well to serve as a demarcating line between allowed and unallowed behavior, between productive and enjoying body. In its second part the paper studies new modes of illness metaphors appearing in the time of late socialism in Bulgaria as a result from the changes of socialist bodily ideal and replacement of the cares for the‚ machin‘ with the concern about human organism. It analyzes the new usages of illness and draws the conclusion that from the middle of the 1960s through the metaphors of illness some kind of equalization between socialist and normal, between social and natural is achieved. The breaches of socialist moral symbolized with the images of disease have been represented not only as acts against communism but as actions against the inalterable laws of nature.

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