ABSTRACT
These Girls Want No Romance: Neoliberal Entrepreneurial Libido and Gender In her 1994 hit “Red Ferrari,” popular turbo folk performer Dragana Mirkovic´ sings (in
heavily accented English): “You can tell me / That you love me / Or never say a word / I just don’t care / It’s alright / ‘Cause what I like / When we’re in your Ferrari people stare.” Later in the same song Mirkovic´ sings: “Your car / Is what our love is all about (it knocks me out) / Step on it baby / Your red Ferrari turns me on.” As a performer who channels the song’s circuit of desire, Mirkovic´ articulates a longing for a material symbol of capitalist power, while the man who owns it is but a middleman and solely a means to achieve class mobility, not an object of desire in and of himself. Similarly, Tina Ivanovic´ articulates, in her 2004 hit “Bunda od nerca” (“Mink Coat”) an incessant desire to own such a titular coat: “If you have the guts / If you have heart / Buy me a mink coat,” thereby challenging her man to demonstrate his manhood by gifting the woman with material goods which would translate as her economic power, not his. The same singer states in her 2006 song “Cabrio Porsche” (“Cabriolet Porsche”): “When there is no love / A compensation is not a bad thing either / It wouldn’t be bad if you parked / A cabriolet Porsche into my garage.” Here again the car is re-signified into an object of desire par excellence, and sexual overtones are deployed to depict a woman’s calculated material ambition, not her desire for a man.4
