Abstract:
I outline three ideal types of imagery of the intimate relationship and gender roles in Bulgarian popular culture in the years after the fall of the totalitarian regime. In the years after 1989 no hegemony could be established so the collective imagination was fragmented. By analysing song lyrics, street slang, jokes and subcultural groups, I try to reconstruct the different images of a love relationship and gender roles. I argue that these are reducible to three ideal types: a liberal, a conservative and a carnivalesque imagery of intimacy. The liberal imagines the intimate relationship as entered by a completely autonomous individual, author of himself and opposing broader society with its rules and institutions, whose members, in complying with these rules, are undistinguishable one from the other. The conservative, quite on the contrary, imagines each part in an intimate relationship as defined by what it presents as ‘traditional’ to a group defined as ‘Bulgarians’ or ‘Balkan peoples’ strict roles. In reality even the imaginary ideal lover that either of these discourses construct is a hybrid of autonomy and clearly defined gender roles. The carnivaleque imagery of intimacy mocks any kind of social roles and the ideologies that legitimate them. When it does offer a positive image of a love relationship it is completely mystical and in open denial of any possible world.
