Vidmar Horvat Ksenija: Imaginarna majka

Ksenija Vidmar Horvat: Imaginary Mother

Gender and Nationalism in 20th Century Culture

Imaginary Mother is a collective biographical study of mothers in 20th century Western culture. The biography is focused on the mythological social foundation of women in the role of mother on the one hand, and the ethnographic testimony of women on motherhood on the other. The intersection of these two forces is an area of numerous
tensions and conflicts that the author illuminates with the help of historical-cultural and historical-sociological research of visual genres, primarily photography, media ethnographies and various professional discourses.
The author considers mothers and motherhood to be a key ideological parameter for determining national policies in the 20th century — regardless of whether it is Western American or Eastern socialist culture.
In the analyzes that confirm this thesis, there are socialist partisan mothers, Western capitalist romantic mothers, racially marked black and proletarian heroic mothers, transitional melodramatic mothers — all the way to "Mama Jelka" and Jovanka Broz, placed in the borderland
of undefined maternal icons. The professional discourse made the twentieth century the "century of the child", subordinating to it the freedom of women to decide on their fate — both as mothers and non-mothers. But neither the experts nor the ideologues amused by this subordination did not notice that, in the twilight of the welfare state,
the mission of reproduction of the nation was transferred to transnational mothers.

Prof. Ph.D. Ksenija Vidmar Horvat (1966) is a cultural sociologist and comparatist. Since 2000, she has been teaching the compulsory course Sociology of Culture at the Department of Sociology of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Ljubljana, and also deals with media, gender issues and global culture.
Her scientific research work is focused on the issues of cultural globalization, post-socialism, transcultural studies, cultural identities, minorities, memory, questions of post-national cosmopolitanism and Europeanization.
She is a member of the editorial board. of the European Journal of Cultural Studies and the expert group for the study of Roma culture at the European Union. She has collected and edited classic texts in the field of film and television theory, is the co-editor of special editions of the Slovenian magazines Delta, Teorija i praksa and the Journal of Criticism of Science, and is the co-editor of the electronic edition of the
Great General Sociological Lexicon. intermediate views (2008), Maps between. Essays on European culture and identity after the end of the Cold War (2009).
Since 2009, she has been the head of the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Philosophy. From 2013 to 2016, she was a member of the Commission for Research and Development of the University of Ljubljana.