Fragmented Identities: Popular Culture, Sex, and Everyday Life in Postcommunist Romania [Paperback]

Observing postcommunist Romania with the dual vision of a native and a scholar, Denise Roman focuses on the fluid act of identity-formation, and the construction or absence of identity-politics, in several minority or disempowered groups: youth, Jews, women, and queers. Roman shows how both aesthetic and moral judgments are born from and embedded in popular culture. Fragmented Identities is rich in observation and analysis, broad in scope, and exuberant in its account of cultural innovation and discourse wrought in response to the end of Communism and the influence of globalization.Denise Roman is a visiting scholar with the UCLA Center for the Study of Women.

Ms. Roman is anything but a detached traveler, although she does bring to her writing a most insightful and often amusing account of the state of politics and identity in Bucharest. But this is politics and identity in no common understanding of those terms. Skillfully teasing her own innovative interpretations from the insights of historians, sociologists, political, feminist, and cultural theorists, Ms. Roman . . . dismantle[s] old conceptions and convincingly reconstruct[s] new ones about the 'politics of life' in Eastern Europe today. By brilliantly bringing together disparate strands of thought in truly innovative, provocative, and sometimes even sly ways, she has written not only an outstanding piece of academic scholarship, but a real 'page turner.' Debra Renee Kaufman, Northeastern University; author of Rachel's Daughters

In this important book Denise Roman takes us to an exciting journey through 1980s and 1990s Bucharest. Her analysis of experiences and practices of the everyday life of women, youth, and queers leaves the reader with a deeper understanding of the complexity of the economic, political, and social changes the Eastern European societies underwent as they emerged from Communism. Gordana Rabrenovic, Northeastern University

Roman has managed to do what only a handful lc%