Centerfold and Periphery: How Playboy Defined the ‘Russian Woman’

• In Event: Sex and the (Post-)Soviet Woman

Abstract

By reading selected issues of Playboy Magazine in a wider ecosystem of popular erotic media, this paper traces how U.S. media from the 1950s-1980s imagined the Soviet Union as a destination for sex tourism. Particularly, it calls attention to how Slavic, Caucasian, and Romani women are collapsed into the figure of the “Russian woman,” refracting and reinforcing Soviet nationality policies and ideologies of ethnic difference and assimilation.

Author

• Fiona Bell, U of Utah