Gastvortrag von Ana Hofman, Ljubljana
in englischer Sprache

»We didn't sing, it was shameful«
Music and Gender in the Balkans

The topic of gender in music research has already been detected and well-examined. Regarding the Balkans, in recent scholarly  accounts dedicated to this topic, however, there is a gap. This lecture aims to cover that gap and reflect on gender politics and music practices in the Balkans, particularly focusing onthe area of Southeastern Serbia.
In the first part, I discuss general concepts related to gender in recent ethnomusicological literature, focusing more closely on the politics of gender in musical practices in the Balkans. In the second part, I present a case study of female singers from the area of Southeastern Serbia, thus to situate the existent approaches with specific music situations and particular musical experiences of my interlocutors. While in the first part I offer a holistic overview of the politics of gender in music-making, in the second I refer to individual experiences in order to show all the complexities, fluidities and contradictions associated with gendered music-making.

Montag, 9. Dezember 2013, 18.00 Uhr
Seminarraum des Instituts für Volksmusikforschung und Ethnomusikologie
Ungargasse 14, 2. Stock
1030 Wien

Ana Hofman, an ethnomusicologist, received her PhD from the Graduate School for Intercultural Studies at the University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia. Currently, she is associate researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts in Ljubljana and lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities of University of Nova Gorica. Currently, she is a visiting fellow at the Centre of Southeast European Studies at the Unviersity of Graz.
Her research interests include music in socialist and post-socialist societies with an emphasis on former Yugoslavia, music and cultural memory, music and gender, applied ethnomusicology. She has published a number of book chapters and articles. In 2009 and 2010 she was a co-editor of the International Journal for the Euro-Mediterranean Studies. In 2011 she published the monograph Staging socialist femininity: Gender Politics and Folklore Performances in Serbia, Balkan Studies Series, Brill Publishing, which is translated in Serbian in 2012.