ABSTRACT
Celebrity discourse in traditional and new media is central for circumventing the issue of class in public discourse, particularly by drawing the boundaries between deserving elites and corrupted and undeserving elites. This contributes to the naturalisation of class differences as a category of nature and meritocratic achievement. The performance of virtuous ordinariness is one of the main cultural tropes through which contemporary deserving elites are represented. Many of them represent and perform themselves against the backdrop of this trope. Through an analysis of representations of Melania Trump – “a Slovene bride”, as she was often lovingly called in local popular media – I will try to explain how the representation of femininity in celebrity narratives, which are in themselves narratives about social distinctions and class, necessarily involves doing nation. I address the representation of M. Trump as an anchor for a range of national ambivalences associated with “post-socialism” and the role of culture in the formation of a neo-liberal cultural imaginary. Eastern Europe is, as the backdrop of the apolitical discourse of the success of “one of our own”, reinvented here through colonising tropes that rest on the notion of the sexual availability of the exotic other.
