Negotiating Normality by Daniela Koleva

Author:Daniela Koleva [Koleva, Daniela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781351503280
Google: eR0uDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-12T04:59:06+00:00

6

Experiencing Socialism: Female Singers in Southeastern Serbia

Ana Hofman

This chapter examines the strategies in performances of socialist femininity by exploring personal narratives of women involved in amateur cultural activities in their villages from the beginning of the 1970s to the end of the 1980s. My focus is on the older generation of women (born prior to and during World War II)1 in the area of Niško Polje in southeastern Serbia, who were the protagonists of important changes in Serbian rural society, its discourses, and practices.2 My interlocutors3 were all very good singers who took an active part in the villages’ cultural activities, mostly at stage cultural events organized by cultural institutions established to suit the demands of the new socialist cultural policy, such as Culture Houses (Domovi kulture), Collective Houses (Zadružni domovi), Cultural-Educational Associations (Kulturno-prosvetne zajednice, KPZs), or Cultural-Artistic Societies (Kulturno umetnička društva, KUDs). These events contributed to the development of “culture and entertainment” (kulturno-zabavni život) and amateur activities (amaterizam) in rural areas as a part of the larger project of modernization and emancipation of Yugoslav cultural policy.

Applying the oral history method, my intention was to keep a record of the women’s personal histories, points of view, and interpretations of the past.4 The autobiographical testimonies made it possible to present women as individuals differentiated by age, attitudes, and background. However, although the emphasis was on the “polyvocality” of their accounts, the fieldwork revealed that my interlocutors shared common experiences as members of village amateur groups, which shaped their discourses in a similar way. Drawing on the phenomenological feminist approach and on “the narrative musical ethnography,”5 this chapter shows the ways in which personal experience and individual discourses can be used as sources of insight in researching the interplay between ideology and practice in socialism. I have employed the approaches of some post-structuralist feminist theorists who have criticized the essentialist concept of experience as an “authentic truth” as introduced by the standpoint theory.6 They have suggested the category of experience not as a true and authentic subjective testimony, but as a discursively created active, volatile, and creative force.7 Therefore, my aim is not to argue for an essentialist approach to women’s identity and experiences, as suggested by the concept of women’s oral history, which claims a particular “women’s history” based on women’s specific voices and experiences.8 Employing the phenomenological approach based on a self-reflexive and dialogic research methodology, my goal is to offer polyvocal and multifaceted research strategies of many complex and contradictory experiences of socialism. I will examine the role of experience in the processes of re-creation of the female singers’ subjectivities and negotiation of power relations and gender hierarchies as a result of the interplay between ideology and everyday life strategies. This will make it possible to understand the complex relation between political discourses, on the one hand, and the lived experiences of my interlocutors, on the other. Therefore, the focus will be on the links between the personal and the political, since the changes in self-perception and the restructuring of social relations can be perceived as an integral part of political change.

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