Roma girl and arranged marriage in Slovenia
anecdote · Slovenian/Yugoslav ·
retold in 14 talks
A Roma girl in Slovenia escaped to police claiming her father sold her into an arranged marriage; the Roma community leader argued this practice is essential to their way of life's reproduction, removing it destroys them as a community. Žižek presents this as a genuine deadlock between universal rights and cultural self-determination.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 11
“if you protect the girl you don't respect their way of life — what do you do here?”
“arranging marriages is the very core of our way of life if you take this from us in two-three generations we disappear”
“arranged marriages are one of the absolutely crucial mechanisms of the reproduction of our society”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Tamer Nafar3Marine Le Pen8Reinhard Heydrich6Emmanuel Macron5Anders Behring Breivik5Recep Tayyip Erdoğan4Wolfgang Streeck2Louis Antoine de Saint-Just3
alongside works
Every retelling 12
A Roma girl in Slovenia escaped to police claiming her father sold her into an arranged marriage; the Roma community leader argued this practice is essential to their way of life's reproduction, removing it destroys them as a community. Žižek presents this as a genuine deadlock between universal rights and cultural self-determination., illustrating multiculturalism vs. universal rights,cultural antagonism,limits of tolerance
A twelve-year-old Roma girl fled to Slovenian police to escape a marriage arranged by her father; the Roma community defended the practice as the very core of their way of life, arguing that without it they would disappear in two or three generations. Feminists who normally endorsed multiculturalism were forced to take a universal women's-rights position., illustrating way of life,multiculturalism,universalism vs. cultural relativism,antagonism
A Roma girl fled an arranged marriage and feminists supported her, but the same feminists were the official protectors of multiculturalism; a Roma leader said on Slovene TV that arranged marriage is a crucial mechanism of their society's reproduction, and removing it reduces them to a tourist spectacle., illustrating multiculturalism,Leitkultur,the unavoidable choice
A Roma girl fled an arranged marriage; feminists supported her, but a Roma community leader pointed out that arranged marriage is central to their way of life and its abolition would destroy the community. Illustrates the intractable conflict between universal rights and ways of life., illustrating ways of life,multiculturalism,jouissance
A Roma girl in Slovenia escaped her family when her father tried to arrange her marriage at age twelve; feminists protected her, but Roma community leaders argued that arranged marriages are a central constituent of their communal identity, without them, in two generations only food and bands remain, the community is over., illustrating praising hypocrisy and external manners,the neighbor,multicultural dilemma
A young Roma girl in Slovenia escaped her community claiming she faced a prearranged marriage; multicultural feminists demanded her protection, but the Roma leader replied that arranged marriages are constitutive of their community's existence and that prohibiting them ends multiculturalism itself., illustrating the internal contradictions of liberal tolerance,the impossibility of neutral universalism