Archive for: Culture Studies

This study of a festive dinner in a rural micro-community in the period of socialist Yugoslavia shows how a group confirms and redefines its existence through a formal menu. The menu bears the male sex signifier, yet matches the taste of all the consumers. The abundance of meat in the meals shows that “a class body” – a strong (male) body is desirable, revealing the deepest dispositions of habitus. Alcoholic drinks are taken by both men and women, yet men drink more being members of a more dominant sex, thus having a greater need in reproducing the cultural norm. The activity of preparing and serving food at the table is not subject to ritual rules and bears the female sex signifier. By introducing changes in the menu and by emancipation of the woman at the dinner table, this patriarchal micro-community shows dynamics and flexibility, thereby negating the stereotype of the rural population as passive. The differences in the economic power are least visible at the festive dinner table, which confirms the Bourdieu’s statement that food is a privileged field where it is symbolically possible to regain dignity and self-respect of the social groups positioned at the bottom of the social ladder, in real economic and social terms.

The paper is an attempt at illustrating the radical changes in the way in which gender, media and literature interact. Its intention is also to examine the ways in which the media and new digital technologies contribute to representations of gender-linked communication in the novels written by Vida Ognjenović, Ljubica Arsić, Tamara Jecić and Dunja Radosavljević. The new informational technologies have managed to capture the voices lingering at the margins, helping women transcend their real-life grounded identities and explore new narrative practices. The process of identification of women’s social self as depicted in contemporary Serbian women’s writing (such as Dunja Radosavljević’s Life After America, Tamara Jecić’s Stinky Onion, Vida Ognjenović’s The Address is Correct and Ljubica Arsić’s All Inclusive) lavishly uses computer mediated communication. These books introduce different kinds of women’s narratives, ranging from intimate confessions in letters and journals to experimental practices involving different points of view and focalisation. The aim of the paper is to analyze the ways gender is redefined in the cyberrituals of womanhood.

Starting with the interrelated notions of globalization, postmodernism and neoliberalism, relying on their theoretical overlap, we suggest possible directions of inquiry that would clarify some aspects of the specific and today omnipresent “New Age” spirituality. Individualistic and eclectic, New Age spirituality arose in the context of countercultural movements of the sixties. It includes various kinds of metaphysical syncretisms combined with elements of modern science and humanistic psychology. We will try to show how this type of spirituality corresponds with the dominant cultural logic of the late capitalism (which we understand as global, postmodern, neoliberal, multicultural, multinational, etc). We proceed from the assumption that there is a number of points of correspondence and that it is possible to create a New Age genealogy that would clarify them. That would create prerequisites for the analysis of transposition of countercultural legacy in the neo-liberal narratives, and enable us to address the role of spirituality as a mediator in this process and as a specific mechanism of interpellation. In this way, we will deal with the reproduction and social functions of specific ideological forms in the dominant motifs of contemporary spirituality. Distributed across the growing market of the mind-body-spirit literature, the New Age worldview appears as a specific technology of the self and as an ideological aggregation point. In this point, the boundaries between market ideology and conception of reality as a hidden order/conscious self-organizing equilibrium disappear. The deification of being as „a market ontology“ results in theodicy and produces self-accusing subjectivity. This opens the door to engaging in political neoliberalism theology within an already wide-ranging discussion that replaces the secularization theory with the idea of history of political societies as a succession of different forms of sacralization.