Nation, Gender, Class: Celebrity Culture and the Performance of Identity in the Balkans

In this article, we explore performance and the “dramatic realization” of local female social elites in popular mass-market magazines in Slovenia and Croatia between 2008 and 2011. We argue that popular culture—and, more specifically, celebrity discourse—is one of the central locations for analyzing cultural shifts in gender, nationality, and class in postsocialist society. At the center of the discussion is the argument that ethnicity should not be seen as an independent social process; the rise of national distinctions in the Balkans and the reframing of the nation need to be examined by stressing the rearticulations of class, ethnicity, and gender as they are experienced as organizing categories of social differences. We focus on two genres: social chronicles, or “society pages,” and photo interviews with elite professionals. We investigate the key intersections of gender, class, and nationality and, more generally, reflect on the transformations in discourses of Balkan identity.