CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Kepplova, Zuzana |
|---|---|
| Title | The Beat of 'Cool Capitalism': How Slovak Club Cultures Helped Make the New Middle Class |
| Summary | In this project, I study club cultures as a vehicle of ‘cool capitalism’ in transition Slovakia. By club cultures I mean the all-night-long parties where electronic dance music is played by a DJ and clubbers dance extended hours often stimulated by chemical substances. I argue that clubs were a milieu where clubbers could acquire dispositions of a new ‘progressive’ middle class. This class fraction corresponds to the global middle class of flexible workers in the creative economy who adapt well to neo-liberal capitalist structures in contemporary democracies. In the times when ‘traditional’ countercultures could no longer provide solutions, club cultures were a laboratory where clubbers could conceptualize and practice new (entrepreneurial) approaches to cultural organization and gain knowledge and skills transferable into ‘trendy’ jobs. Club cultures were also a mighty platform for assembling new consumer imaginary: clubbers were addressed as ‘party nation’ not just by the niche-specific media but also by, for instance, mobile phone operators or tobacco campaigns. Clubbers thus emerged as a value group of cosmopolitan orientation which imagined itself as ‘connected’ and harboring ‘good taste’. Such taste was perceived in contrast with the ‘mainstream’ and ‘disco-goers’ denoting gendered class. I further propose that gender/sexuality experiments conducted in clubs and conveyed by the imagery of related media were crucial for constituting the new economic subject. In this respect, I suggest the term neo-liberal sexual revolution as the gender/sexuality order promoted in clubs was closely attached to new ways of organizing culture and thinking about art and youth culture as inextricably related to the market. |
| Supervisor | Cerwonka, Allaine |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/kepplova_zuzana.pdf |
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