Kafana Singers: Popular Music, Gender and Subjectivity in the Cultural Space of Socialist Yugoslavia
Kafana Singers: Popular Music, Gender and Subjectivity in the Cultural Space of Socialist Yugoslavia

Summary/Abstract: This article explores the phenomenon of kafana singers in the light of the oficial socialist discourses on popular music and gender during the late 1950s and 1960s in the former Yugoslavia. It seeks to understand how/did the process of estradization along with the socialist gender policy influence the shift in (self)representation of the female performers in the public realm. By focusing on the dynamic of controversial discourses on folk female singers, the article aims to show how the changes in the official discourse helped their profession to become an important resource of their subject actualizations, implicated in the creation of a new sense of social agency. As controversial musical personas, kafana singers’ personal and professional lives show nuanced interplay between socialist culture policy and its representational strategies.

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