Accessing the trauma of communism

Abstract

This article centres on representations of Romanian women in the on-site reports filmed by American news crews in the days and weeks following the Romanian revolution. Around these representations, the article traces Romania's journey into televisibility on American television news, from an initially inaccessible site of falling communism to an overexposed site of post-communist trauma. Reports from abortion clinics were the first encounters with the territory of Romania that American television offered firsthand to its viewers, and these representations of Romanian women were the first representations of post-communist identities on American television. The article suggests that these representations of post-communist subjects, who appear as overexposed sites on which American television traces the effects of communism and the predicaments of the post-communist condition, display symptomatic features which have remained pervasive.