“The Right Step towards a Woman’s Satisfaction?”: Washing Machine as a New Piece of Technology and the Construction of the Role of Women as Housewives in Socialist Slovenia

Sitar, Polona

doi:10.15176/vol52no107

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Nevertheless, in the Yugoslav case, due to its intimate functioning, McDonaldisation had a wide scope of influence in generating a (new) 'third place experience' for specific social groups. It redefined social interactions particularly for women who were engaged in a long and winding road from the washing machine and the construction of a housewives' role (Sitar 2015) to the establishment of a new narrative of women as 'working girls'.…”

Section: The Late 1980s In Yugoslavia/serbiamentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Sympathy for the Devil?’ McDonald’s between imperialism and the building of post-Yugoslav Serbian identity

Tournois

2023

Politics in Central Europe

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Since the opening of its first restaurant in a communist country, which was Yugoslavia, not only is the huge success of the U.S. franchise something that was merely not supposed to happen, but ‘consuming McDonald’s’ has left its mark on the post ‑Yugoslav identity building process. Our central argument is that the singularity of the ‘McDonaldization of Serbia’ encompasses the interactions between expansion/ localness, dominance/adaptation and those who take part in this historical process which spans more than three decades, their responses that apprise, shape and constrain their everyday life conditions. This paper starts from the observation that most of the existing scholarly literature on identity building addresses the end of the Yugoslav experience whether through state narratives or identities introverted. We chose a different and understudied angle, which is a people ‑centred perspective. Accordingly, this paper uses different research methods under the umbrella of a biographical perspective from 1988 to 2021. Ethnographic fieldwork, comprising 45 semi ‑structured interviews with Belgradians, aims to expand scholarly knowledge on consumption and identity building in post ‑Yugoslav Serbia. In addition, conversations with influential individuals contributed to identify periods in the intermingled life of McDonald’s and people in contemporary Serbia. In the early 1990s, the McDonaldisation to some extent escalated cultural disputes between the republics against a backdrop of identity tensions. During the period spanning from the late years of Milosevic’s rule to the advent of Alexandar Vučić in 2012, political conflicts over sovereignty sparked ambiguous civic responses. Finally, McDonald’s has brought Serbs into the Western sphere which is probably best encapsulated in a local popular saying ‘McDonald’s is McDonald’s’ (‘Mek je Mek’), despite being considered ‘tasty’/unhealthy, expensive/rewarding or socially stimulating.

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Section: The Late 1980s In Yugoslavia/serbiamentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Sympathy for the Devil?’ McDonald’s between imperialism and the building of post-Yugoslav Serbian identity

Tournois

2023

Politics in Central Europe

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“…2 Consumption and leisure became the central foundations of social well-being, together with social welfare in the form of healthcare and social insurance, and women served as the domestic bearers of socialist modernization with the mission of transforming the rest of their family members into modern citizens. 3 Clothing was one of the areas in which the identity and loyalty of citizens toward the state were negotiated. This article understands clothing as the holistic external appearance of a person, together with body decoration, and therefore defi nes it as a system of body modifi cations and/or accessories, displayed by a person while communicating with others.…”

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confidence: 99%

Stiletto Socialism

Sitar

2020

Aspasia

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This article explores how women interpreted everyday clothing practices and decoration of their body and how they positioned themselves in different social milieus during the period of socialist Slovenia (1945–1991). The new socialist middle class in Slovenia and Yugoslavia was defined by participation in a lifestyle, created and expressed through consumption and behaviors that turned everyday life into a symbolic display of taste and cultural distinction. This article shows the ways women engaged in self-expression and negotiated dressing up. It analyzes the self-emancipation of women as they challenged the boundaries of social hierarchies on the basis of self-transformations, pointing out the active role that women had in their self-positioning in social categories.

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“The Right Step towards a Woman’s Satisfaction?”: Washing Machine as a New Piece of Technology and the Construction of the Role of Women as Housewives in Socialist Slovenia

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

‘Sympathy for the Devil?’ McDonald’s between imperialism and the building of post-Yugoslav Serbian identity

‘Sympathy for the Devil?’ McDonald’s between imperialism and the building of post-Yugoslav Serbian identity

Stiletto Socialism

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