ABSTRACT
The collapse of the communist regime in the Balkans signaled, among other things, a new attitude towards women's bodies, ushering, in turn, an influx of pornography and other sexual taboos of the past. The really fascinating fact about the turbo-folk genre is that its most attractive performers were female and arguably were among the first women who displayed their sexuality publicly against the norms of proper socialist femininity. The turbo-folk phenomenon certainly set the stage for a new visual aesthetic both in terms of mediated performance and in terms of visualizing women's bodies in spaces previously characterized by a very deliberate absence of women's physicality and sexuality. As Carol Silverman pointed out, sexuality during the socialist period may have been suppressed but it was barely under the surface, ready to reemerge as a capitalist commodity. In post-communist transition, the sense of femininity became defined by Western media imports, packed with deliberate images of idealized women, often in sexually suggestive manner.
