American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a 'Normal' Life in Postsocialist Hungary

Throughout the post-Soviet bloc, people regularly describe as 'normal' high-quality commodities and living environment so therwise considered extraordinary in their local context. In Hungary, this discourse of the normal indicates that middle-class aspirants, claiming 'European' status, now evaluate their own standards of living by comparison to imagined western ones. Looking to the socialist period, I argue that the construction of a socialist modern consumer led to the equation of western standards of living with self-value and dignity. Western material worlds were perceived to be conducive to a form of family life and personhood impossible under the 'abnormal' conditions of state-socialism. As this new standard comes to dictate middle-class fashioning, it becomes instrumental in the ongoing social, economic and material transformation of the country.