Abstract:

The lecture engages with a so far almost ignored topic in socialist popular music production – women. It is often believed that female performers are emblematic of popular music and that their personas are an index of social changes, and particularly changes in identity performance. Popular music production in socialist Yugoslavia reflects these processes in many aspects: female performers have embodied all ambiguities of official cultural politics, being controversial public personas and symbolizing both a socialist woman and a capitalist entertainer, a working person and a “star.” Because of all that, female performers are a perfect ground for showing the complexity of popular music production during the times of socialism in Yugoslavia and its receptions, interpretations and employments. Through the lenses of the so-called personalized historical narrativity of female socialist stars, focussing particularly on the gendered aspects of professional musicianship and music labour, the lecture discusses the complex interplay between ideology, discourse and practice, which gain a variety of contested political employments in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav contexts.

Biographie:

Ana Hofman, an ethnomusicologist, received her PhD from the Graduate School for Intercultural Studies at the University of Nova Gorica (Slovenia) with a dissertation titled Gender Politics and Folklore Performance in Socialist Serbia. Currently, she is associate researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts in Ljubljana and lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities of University of Nova Gorica. In 2013/2014 she was a visiting fellow at the Centre of Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz.

Her research interests include music and gender in socialist and post-socialist societies (with an emphasis on former Yugoslavia), music and cultural memory, and applied ethnomusicology. She has published a number of book chapters and articles. In 2011 she published the monograph Staging socialist femininity: Gender Politics and Folklore Performances in Serbia (Balkan Studies Series), Leiden: Brill. Currently, she is a national coordinator of the European Union FP7 project Gendering Academy and Re-search: Combating Career Instability and Asymmetries (GARCIA).