People Just Like Us

The article explores the representation of political celebrities and their families in photo-interviews in mass market women's magazines and the role of the local personality system in the process of building the nation after Slovenia's succession from Yugoslavia in the 1990s. My aim is to trace how a common national normality was redefined/performed through the celebrification and humanization of political figures in the popular media, and how celebrity discourse has reshaped the understanding of the ‘national ordinary’ and contributed to the individualization of political trust. The visual iconography and the discursive regime within which public personalities were represented in the domestic settings, are explored. The article suggests that the stories on national politicians and their domestic life in women's magazines, were one of the key discourses/institutions through which the audiences have come to imagine themselves as members of a re-ethnicized national community. Classless national community, traditional gender roles and domesticity are here associated with political democratization and new ethnic classless collective self. The photo-interviews or photo-essays of representative families and the entanglement of family and nation are to be understood as part of the hegemonic struggle to define not just national community but also hegemonic masculinity, femininity, the notion of family and domestic normality.