Page date:28 May 2003

Drawing mainly from the tumult of everyday life experiences, Fragmented Identities discusses some of the discourses, identities, experiences, and practices in postcommunist Romania providing an undulating and vivid picture of what constitutes identity construction and identity politics there, all on a background of a fluid civil society. The book focuses on issues of popular culture--and the way aesthetics, youth identity, and hate speech (anti-Semitism) emerge from it--as well as on gender and sexuality--in the form of women and queer identities and politics. Employing the methodology of Critical Cultural Studies and Feminist Theory, Fragmented Identities explores the politics of everyday life in Romania while also providing a context for understanding other similar Eastern European experiences of identity construction and identity politics, gender, and popular culture as the region enters the twenty-first century.

You can order the book directly from the publisher.

Reviewed by Natalie O. Kononenko

Table of Contents

Photographs

Acknowledgments

Part One. Everyday Life

1. A Flâneur through Bucharest at the End of the Twentieth Century

2. Discourses, Identities, and Practices of Everyday Life

Part Two. Popular Culture

3. Aesthetics and Politics: From “Socialist Realism” to “Postcommunist Carnivalesque”

4. “Blue Jeans Generation” and “Generation PRO”: Youth, Pop Culture, and Politics

5. Popular Culture and the Discourse of Hate: The Case of Anti-Semitism

Part Three. Gender and Sexuality

6. The Postcommunist Feminine Mystique: Women as Subjects, Women and Politics

7. Between Ars Erotica and Scientia Sexualis: Queer Subjectivity and the Discourse of Sex

Conclusion

Selected Bibliography

Index

About the Author

EXCERPTS  

(from chapter 1: "A Flâneur through Bucharest")

"The billboards that shine big and high on both sides of the Bucharest-Otopeni road, a road linking the Otopeni airport with downtown Bucharest, are perhaps the best indicators of what postcommunist Romanian everyday life has become. The smiles and seminaked bodies of colorfully photographed young local or foreign girls pictured on these billboards are indicative of the degree of consumer culture that has finally reached the Romanian citizen after 1989. Advertising a wide range of products—tobacco, oil, shopping malls, tires, paints, and appliances—the billboards are crowded one after another in numeric aggressiveness and cramped display. It’s now or never, the billboards seem to say. Downtown Bucharest is jammed with cigarette advertisements covering half a block, while the celebrated character from the American TV serial “Dallas,” “J.R.”—a character played by the actor Larry Hagman—displays an urgent smile on a wide billboard advertising Russian LUKOIL.

A type of “Dallas”-mania has twice hit Romania. First, in the late 1970s, when the national television station presented it as an ideologically crucified symbol of “decadent capitalism.” The second time was in the early 1990s, its signification displaced with one of progressive consumerism, as if trying to give lessons in capitalism. No wonder that many Romanians have imitated the representations conveyed by “Dallas” and, according to public knowledge, there is at least one Southfork ranch replica built by a nouveau riche somewhere in the midst of rural Romania, near the city of Slobozia."

(from chapter 2: "Discourses, Identities, and Practices")

"[T]he section on popular culture first starts by engaging in a comparison of communist and postcommunist aesthetics explained as a change from “socialist realism” into what will be called here, drawing from Mikhail Bakhtin,  postcommunist carnivalesque. This analysis is destined to frame the aesthetic condition and subject-formative experiences of postcommunist urban popular culture, as these will be discussed in the subsequent chapter on youth. Thus, chapter 4 will present the identity construction of the Romanian urban youth in communism and postcommunism—introduced here as the “Blue Jeans Generation” and “Generation PRO”—a form of resistance-identity that remains to this day indissolubly intertwined with various discourses and practices of popular culture. Postcommunist popular culture is also analyzed in terms of hate speech, an often unacknowledged yet widespread discourse that constructs derogatory identifications and representations, here exemplified by the discourse of anti-Semitism as “the mythical Jew.” The third part, on gender and sexuality as identity construction and identity politics, makes an analysis of the way women are constructed as discursive and political subjects in postcommunism. This discussion about gender and sexuality becomes more intricate in the book’s final analysis of the queer subject in present-day Romania

At a more fundamental level and through the empirical material explored, this book also problematizes the cultural and political notions of identity construction and identity politics or, as expressed by Michel Foucault, “technologies of the self” that structure subjectivities and “technologies of power” that structure political identities. In other words, issues of identity construction are here broken down into their constituent elements: the practices or experiences that discursively construct subjectivities. In this case of an analysis of Romanian communism and postcommunism, such practices of identification, indeed such experiences, will be understood through an interrogation of processes of oppression and resistance, and processes that construct “the other.” [. . .]

[T]his book shows that, in light of both precommunist and communist subject-formative patterns, present Romanian society proves to be inhabited more by subjectivities, as practices and experiences generated through oppression and resistance, and less by political identities, which, furthermore, as they are understood in Western democratic politics, are built up on notions of cohesive solidarity, social movements, and vocal identity politics of inclusion/exclusion. In other words, due to the political texture of its empirical background, I suggest here that present Romanian society proves to accommodate an uneven balance between subjectivities or practices and experiences of identity construction—that are in focus here—and political identities or the politics of social movements that have prominence in other such discussions addressing more articulated public expressions of civil society.

Accordingly, various gender and women subject-formative experiences and (anti)feminist practices are discussed here in the absence of a significant feminist movement or political identity. Similarly, queer subjectivity and queer experiences of oppression and resistance are discussed in the absence of clear-cut queer identity and politics, and some urban youth subject-formative experiences through popular culture are discussed in the absence of (politically inclusive) youth politics. The research also makes a discursive analysis of hate speech, here exemplified by anti-Semitism, which inhabits as an anachronism—and particularly in the near absence of the Jewish minority itself—various Romanian discursive spaces, of which popular culture is one. Similar to the absence of feminist, queer, or youth political identities mentioned above, anti-Semitism as a discourse can function in the absence of a significant Jewish entity, organized minority, and subsequent Jewish politics.

Finally, the connection between subjectivities as practices and experiences of identity construction and identity politics of social movements is acknowledged here as an important equation of identity politicization. In the context of Romania’s difficult postcommunist transformation and gradual democratization of civil society, this connection is presently characterized by fluidity and transnational politics, and less by local, vocal mundane politics. Hence, the focus of the book is primarily on identity construction (and its constituent practices, discourses, subjectivities, and everyday life experiences) and only secondarily on identity politics, which, as a politics of social movements, represents a developing possibility today. This apprehension of identity politics seems to constitute a somewhat more pragmatic image of democratic identity and politics in present Romania."