Kafana Singers: Popular Music, Gender and Subjectivity in the Cultural Space of Socialist Yugoslavia
Nar. umjet. 47/1, 2010, pp. 141161, A. Hofman, Kafana Singers: Popular Music, Gender Original scienti c paper Received: Dec. 31, 2009 Accepted: March 5, 2010 UDK 78.036 POP:316](497.1)"195/196"(091) 78.036 POP:39](497.1)"195/196"(091) ANA HOFMAN Department for Interdisciplinary Research in Humanities, SRC SASA, Ljubljana KAFANA SINGERS: POPULAR MUSIC, GENDER AND SUBJECTIVITY IN THE CULTURAL SPACE OF SOCIALIST YUGOSLAVIA This article explores the phenomenon of kafana singers in the light of the of cial socialist discourses on popular music and gender during the late 1950s and 1960s in the former Yugoslavia. It seeks to understand how/did the process of estradization along with the socialist gender policy in uence the shift in (self)representation of the female performers in the public realm. By focusing on the dynamic of controversial discourses on folk female singers, the article aims to show how the changes in the of cial discourse helped their profession to become an important resource of their subject actualizations, implicated in the creation of a new sense of social agency. As controversial musical personas, kafana singers personal and professional lives show nuanced interplay between socialist culture policy and its representational strategies. Key words: kafana singers, popular music, socialist culture policy, estradization, gender politics Petar Lukoviþ, a journalist, writes about the folk singer Lepa Lukiþ in his book Bolja prolost: prizori iz muziĀkog ivota Jugoslavije 19401989 [A Better Past: Scenes from Yugoslav Music Life 19401989], making the following observation: In the future feminist debates, Lepa Lukiþ will occupy a special place: before her, women in estrada were more or less objecti ed, primarily treated like disreputable persons.
[Show full text]