Plazonja, Dunja

Creativity and creative practices are today no longer considered the sole possession and attribute of tortured male geniuses. Taken off its high cultured pedestal, creativity has been relegated onto the realm of the everyday and the “ordinary”; creative practices are both a hobby and a job, an outlet for and escape from our daily lives, routines and, especially, obligations. Today’s creative practices have taken on a particularly important role when it comes to the personal lives of girls and women; being creative and/or doing creative work for many women means having basic or extra income, earning money to pay off debt, loans, bills, mortgages, college, etc. or simply being happy, fulfilled and strong-minded. However, in today’s world, largely defined by its economic and financial instability and hardships, and the precarious living and working conditions many of us find ourselves in, creativity is for many still a luxury, a dream that if unfulfilled leads to further anxieties and frustrations. In light of all this, this paper will analyze my own personal struggles with precarious working conditions that made it impossible for me to write anything ranging from short essays to my PhD thesis over a number of years, and how my form of escape from those anxieties, and simultaneously a form of “cure” for this “illness”, became photography. What is significant, and what I will attempt to analyze in this paper, is that the subject I so frantically started photographing when my anxiety was at its worst was my own neighborhood, the residential area built around a factory as housing for its workers, where my family had been living for half a century. This extremely personal, working class environment and the lives of the people living there became the means for understanding the anxiety I was dealing with, and for realizing the tentative link between women’s lives and the working conditions dis/allowing their creative work. This paper will, therefore, tread that thin line between public and personal, proving how often women are forced to silently walk that line.

Dunja Plazonja was born in 1984. She graduated in Comparative Literature and English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb and is now a PhD candidate in literature, writing her thesis in feminism and narratology. She has published papers in Croatia and abroad and presented her work at numerous conferences around Europe.

Her areas of interest are: popular culture, feminist readings of horror films, feminist dystopian fiction, contemporary women writers, affect theory, and autofiction.

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