This article looks at the Thai massage industry in Slovenia and its impact on the perception of Thai women workers among users of the service. The arrival of Thai massage salons in Slovenia presents an aspect of global "body work", which has increasingly relied on the labour of migrant women from the global South. In Slovenia, however, the presence of Thai female labour is a relatively new development, as is migration from Asia more broadly. In our analysis, we focus on the cultural aspects of the encounter between the providers and users of the service, as it unfolds in the micro setting of the massage salons. We argue that the closeness of the encounter between the two bodies - the worker's and the consumer's - complicates the concept of the modern stranger, as it is usually attached to the (male) migrant in the public space. Moreover, the intimate contact with the migrant worker confuses the hierarchies of gender, race and ethnicity and shifts the location of power and vulnerability. Our findings are then placed within the broader frame of contemporary post-socialist Slovene society to ask how this particular experience of body work may coincide with, or contest, local attitudes towards global migrants.
COBISS.SI-ID: 35917405
The radical break between two national contexts in 1991, when Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia, and Slovenia's integration into the European Union in 2004, has brought changes to the collective memory of the Slovenian nation. In this article, I investigate how Delo, a major Slovenian daily newspaper, has been involved in memory struggles to present new memorial discourses that are in accordance with the new national politics. A large part of the common Yugoslav past has been reinvented for the present political and ideological purposes of European integration, whereby the Second World War and the Partisan movement, which once signified a common Yugoslav life, have become a contested issue. The focus of the critical narrative analysis is put on those general narrative templates that underlie specific news narratives about the Second World War and socialist Yugoslavia. Over the last 25 years, dominant media have strengthened memory struggles in the Slovenian public realm and have created revisionist narratives of the Second World War and the post-war past.
COBISS.SI-ID: 35069533
The chapter focuses on the role of cultural capital in the structural processes of power reproduction in post-socialism’s neoliberal capitalism, which is imbued with socialist egalitarian legacy. We want to illustrate the relationship between social stratification and cultural consumption in the context of post-socialist restoration of capitalism in Slovenia. Our purpose is to bring class back into analysis, and to highlight the increase of social stratification over the last twenty-five years of state’s existence. We also seek to emphasize the intersections between socio-economic and national lines. The chapter shows how questions of structural class differences are displaced, and how class is rearticulated as a problem of nation-ness. The empirical analysis draws on survey data on the cultural consumption and taste of the population of the two largest Slovenian cities.
COBISS.SI-ID: 35162973
Both historically and conceptually, patriotism has been one of the foundational characteristics that defines the very essence of one’s attachment, identification and loyalty to a political community and a basic virtue associated with citizenship as a political conception of the person. Despite its centrality in the pantheon of political ideals, patriotism remains a contested concept and an elusive virtue as well as a source of potential conflicts and violence. In fact, the willingness to kill or die for one’s country has been traditionally viewed as the most profound and genuine form of expression of patriotism. This paper examines some of the foundational elements associated with the discussion over patriotism. The introductory part presents the 'contextual' aspect of patriotism and the ambivalence contemporary discussions about patriotism are faced with. This paper is composed of five parts. The first and the second part examine the ‘standard’ analysis of patriotism and its basic elements. The third part provides the identification of the fundamental motivating impulses most commonly associated with patriotism. The next part discusses the most important objections to patriotism as articulated by its many critics. The concluding part of this paper emphasizes that patriotism is to be understood as a civic, moral and epistemic phenomenon.
COBISS.SI-ID: 3065175
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 idea that ethnicity should not be seen as an independent social process; the rise of national distinctions in the Balkans and the reframing the nation, need to be examined by stressing the rearticulation 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 of discourses of Balkan identity.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33388637
This paper examines the sexual contract in the 21st century. The analysis first focuses on the transformation in modernity from the liberal to the neoliberal social contract. This is then compared to the changes in the private spheres of home and domesticity. It is argued that the new gender composition of Western homes that consist of female migrant labour, contest the idea of the sexual contract as institutionalised in modernity. The work of Carole Pateman is taken as a starting point, while some new artistic interventions, as well as transnational motherhood and sham marriages, are used to inspect the future of the social contract in the 21st century.
COBISS.SI-ID: 64153186
This chapter investigates the idea of cosmopolitan patriotism. Since the original publication of the key reference work by Anthony K. Appiah, a fresh look at the cosmopolitanism and patriotism, if considered individually, may lead to a new, qualitatively different understanding of their respective role in the pair. A key assumption that needs to be reassessed, following Appiah, we argue, is the notion of the home, together with the idea of the "roots", and "cultural difference". Consequently, this analysis in the second part revisits both aspects: the "home" and "cultural difference" are critically approached from the perspective of patriotism and, by observing Appiah's own contribution to the field, postcolonial theory. In the third section, the findings are reexamined in light of contemporary development of transnationalism on the one hand, and xenophobic nationalism on the other, asking whether cosmopolitan patriotism still stands as a germane idea to challenge both.
COBISS.SI-ID: 65246050
The paper analyses reporting about the "refugee crisis" in Slovenia's three main daily newspapers Delo, Dnevnik and Večer in the first weeks of mass migrations through the country that were named "the first and the second wave of refugees" by the journalists. The analysis focuses on the question of framing and on the dominant journalistic conventions through which objectivity is performed. The paper tries to reflect on the paradox in reporting these issues where the problem is dominantly framed in terms of humanitarian crisis on the explicit level and rarely as a security issue but on the connotative level factism and episodic framing suggest another reading of the problem that supports the fear of the imigrants. What is more, examples of more engaged reporting can be found where archetypal figures of heroes are called upon and where daily news functions similar as myth.
COBISS.SI-ID: 34711901
This paper proposes an analysis of the social contract as a vital apriori concept needed in thinking about the prevention of political totalitarianisms. After analysing its conceptual foundations out of the dynamics of Western metaphysic, it demonstrates how the social contract for the 21st century cannot be a mere continuation of contractualism from the 17th century. The most important shift in contractual thought is the insight that the individual (and his contractual will) cannot be taken as the foundation of the state organism. To understand the relationship between the individual and general will, against which it is possible to think contractualism for the 21th century, the paper draws on Hegel’s concept of the civil society (Bürgerliche Gesellschaft). This allows for overcoming the impasse of contractualism in thinking about the state, while at the same time keeping the initiative of the autonomous individual at its core. A legitimate state must incorporate countless channels through which the thinking of autonomous individuals passes into the life of a state. It is precisely the keeping alive of this sphere which guarantees that the state does not slide into a totalitarian pattern.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1539317700
The paper examines the historical legacy of volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, with a special emphasis on the biographical portraits of female volunteers. This segment of transnational solidarity in the Spanish Civil War has not yet been submitted to an appropriate socio-historical review, although it could, according to both authors, considerably influence the contemporary discourse on global (cosmopolitan) solidarity, especially in the branch of cosmofeminist theory, which emphasises the politics of compassion and empathy. The essence of the movement of Spanish volunteers, in other words, surpassed the issue of identification with the suffering of others, although this also represented an important element of mobilisation. Nevertheless, identification was not only generally humanistic, but was political and ideational more than anything else, the evidence of which manifested itself in sacrificing one's life for the sake of others. This perspective throws light on contemporary post-humanistic humanitarian solidarity and enables us to critically evaluate its contribution to global justice.
COBISS.SI-ID: 67604066