When the radical is ordinary: ridicule, performance and the everyday in Bulgaria’s protests of 2013

Abstract:

This article examines the performances of the #DANSwithme protests in Bulgaria in the summer and early autumn of 2013, and asks questions about the role of carnival and the everyday as a resource for the elaboration of protest idiom for popular movements. I complement the implications of recent work on carnivalesque protests and politics and argue that in appropriating the sites, tropes, and practices of the everyday and the ordinary in order to parade daily discontent with the political establishment in Bulgaria, the political message of the protest can also lose its exceptionality and become too routine to make a difference.