Feminine Libidinal Entrepreneurship

Abstract

This essay examines the upward mobility appeal of Serbia's post-socialist feminine libidinal entrepreneurship rooted in the figure of the sponzoruša (“sponsored woman”), and closely tied to the aesthetics of turbo folk. Contrary to the dominant critical dismissal of the phenomenon as inherently anti-feminist, the sponzoruša figure has the potential to reveal deeply contradictory tendencies of popular culture: to both reaffirm and transgress some of society's most troubling hierarchies. Here I offer a reparative reading of the sponzoruša as a figure that deploys her very features of sexual difference towards an enactment of class mobility during precarious times. I examine how, within the performative domain of such technologically mediated, post-socialist femininity, a potentially transgressive challenge to traditional gender roles takes place. This challenge, embodied in what I call a cyborg-goddess, exposes both femininity and class identity as historically and economically contingent factors of women's material and cultural marginalization. I argue that turbo folk's sponzoruša has the potential—though not a guarantee—to short-circuit a clean boundary between nature and technology and the ways in which this binary constitutes womanhood as such.