This book is the result of a confrontation with my own text, which has, after years of research and due to various life circumstances, become the place to which I keep returning, in attempts to disentangle, complement and publish it. These attempts, however, usually took the reversed course of entanglement, deletion and postponement until some more favourable times, when I would be able to devote my complete attention to a close reading and editing of the book. Each day took me further away from this goal, but in those moments when I did have the opportunity to get lost, at least for a little while, inside my text, I was re-inspired again by all the interwoven red threads of womenâs authorship in interwar Yugoslavia as they all testified to an unfinished womenâs revolution. This inspirational force started invading other spheres of my (non)institutional work, which has mainly been focused on two significant fields of my collective cultural engagement and individual academic researchâfeminism and Yugoslavia. The years of working on the book in an effort to finish it have generated other numerous forms of engagement in the field of feminist theory and practice, which have primarily beenâand still areâconcentrated on the (post)Yugoslav space as a locus of (geo)political discomfort and social subjectivisation. Despite the âlostâ time, this postponement turns out to be important for structural rewriting of the text as well as for epistemological repositioning of the research between the politics of movement and the politics of knowledge. Thus, even before obtaining a physical form, the book acquired a life of its own, which has been led in perpetual feminist struggle against patriarchal, neoliberal, and other repressive structures of everyday lifeâto the extent, at least, in which interwar feminism inspired me to also participated in it, through different (post)Yugoslav collective praxes, be they academic, artistic, or socially engaged.
From Post-Yugoslav Feminist Engagement to Yugoslaviaâs First Womenâs Movements
Working on sociolinguistic, anthropological, gender and similar themes during my doctoral studies 1 enabled me to approach the questions of womenâs authorship and historicisation of Yugoslav experience from different standpoints. The initial idea on which I based my doctoral research back in the early 2000s focused on the 1990s wars on the territory of former Yugoslavia. Autobiographic, anti-war and anti-nationalist literature of predominantly female authors introduced me to the field of the politics of memory and gender studies. It also introduced me to the impossible processes of historicisation of Yugoslavia in the newly formed post-Yugoslav states, which had, under the banner of striving for a more democratic society and the defeat of the hegemonic regime, fallen into atrocious wars, ethnonationalism and neoliberal transition. After the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, gender, class and nation in Yugoslavia became the main reversals of the newly formed and falsely democratic ethnonational identities, which in turn led also towards a public manipulation of womenâs symbolic representation, as well. Its purpose was propaganda, which found one of its main sources in nationalist culture and, more specifically, literature.
This period saw the process of ethicising national identities and a general demonisation of Yugoslav orientation, whereby womanâs body in new ethnonationalist discourses became a symbolic territory to fight for. The identification of womanâs body with the notions of ethnicity and battlefield had its origin in large spread ethnonationalist myths at that time. Those myths assigned active rolesâthe universal position of the political subjectâto men who should wage wars, protect and expand their territories and property. Julie Mostov explained such process of identification in the following words:
âŚthey forge their identities as males, as agents of the nation over the symbolic and physical territory of the feminine homeland which must be secured and protected from transgression and which holds the seeds and blood of past and future warriors, and over and through the actual bodies of women who reproduce the nation, define its physical limits, and preserve its sanctity. Womenâs body can be seen as providing the battleground for menâs wars: over this battleground of womenâs bodies-borders are transgressed and redrawn. (Mostov 1995: 213)
In such circumstances, different generations of female authors have since the 1990s opposed this newly established trend of patriarchal, warmongering and nationalist writing. 2 They managed to create an alternative to the myth of âthe Balkan syndrome of reciprocal tragedy,â âthe prisoners of an unfinished historyâ and âthe helpless victim of violence.â Those female authors who obviously were not seduced by the ethnonationalist euphoria, wartime propaganda and hatred, false democracy and capitalismâs promise of wealth, were denounced as witches, whores, stateless bastards, traitors, etc. 3 As said by Renata JambreĹĄiÄ Kirin, many of them found the sense of symbolic and cultural disorientation more important than any form of de-territorialisation. The need to face the moral crises was more important to those women than the feeling of rootlessness or historical discontinuity. The loss of rational and reasonable vision of the future was thus in Yugoslavia more destructive than the decline of traditionalâand usually fabricatedânational values. The described feeling of displacement put numerous female authors in the position described by JambreĹĄiÄ Kirin with the oxymoronic phrase âhomeless at homeâ (see JambreĹĄiÄ Kirin 2000).
Consequently, a retraditionalisation of gender roles occurred in the post-Yugoslav space, in accordance with the ideological changes in social relations, nationalist mapping and the turmoil in culture and academia, which have succumbed to ethnonationalist propaganda. These changes were mostly violent and conservative, and hence, they exerted political/nationalist pressure on the academic and cultural institutional framework of society, wherein they were accepted without much resistance. Those who dared show resistance or express somewhat different positions (such as anti-war, anti-nationalist and feminist ones) risked being denounced as traitors of their country or silenced in the process of forming new nationalist frames for academic, artistic and cultural work. Womenâs organisations, feminist activism and research in the fields of feminist history and theory were under the greatest threat of being âexcluded.â Although not powerful enough to defeat the virilised ethnonationalist myths and enforced post-war conflicts and divisions, feminist responses to the (falsely) interpreted models of history, memory, culture, language, politics and art in the 1990s Yugoslavia still managed to establish a certain continuity of emancipatory politics and rescue some knowledge and memories from political amnesia and institutional oblivion.
The politics of feminist writing, reading and translation in the post-Yugoslav space during this period created the necessary conditions for dealing with many topics pertinent to not only womenâs emancipation, but social emancipation as well. Womenâs studies and self-organised feminist schools, publications and actions shaped the sociopolitical and cultural space of the time, in which dealing with womenâs authorship and feminist politics was possible despite the omnipresent culture of misogyny, chauvinism and ethnonationalism (see Potkonjak et al. 2008; Gender, Literature and Cultural⌠2010). This politically engaged production of knowledge on âdifficult subjectsâ also initiated new processes of researching and studying the past, the forgotten and censored history of women and their literary and cultural production. It was womenâs authorship and the activist and academic feminism of post-Yugoslavia that faced the suffering and (war) crimes, refugees, war violence and existential trauma, and, broadly speaking, everything produced by the wartime reality (see PetroviÄ et al. 2006; PetroviÄ 2006, 2009, 2010, 2013). In addition, these initiatives created new, alternative, spaces for working on feminist and gender history in Yugoslavia, tackling the authorship of women and feminist praxes of the past and trying to establish continuity with their predecessors.
Research and other projects dealing with the 1990s womenâs authorship and new ways of the production of knowledge in 2000s in (post)Yugoslav space raised a number of new questions. The main point was certainly in the historical discontinuity of feminist movements and womenâs authorship, which occurred in Socialist Yugoslavia (1943â1991), where women, in the wake of World War II (WW2), did gain equal rights, but also a new kind of invisibility. This blind spot of the knowledge about socialist feminism stimulated me to direct my research of the 1990s anti-nationalist womenâs authorship more into the past. I focused on the possible existence of womenâs engagement and authorship orientation as well as on the question of the representation of Yugoslav women. Despite the political and social emancipation of women after World War II, the Yugoslav literary canon, created during the golden age of Yugoslav socialism, had nevertheless marginalised womenâs authorship in accordance with the dominant and still patriarchal ideology of the so-called fraternity and unity.
Concerning the representation of the socialist women of the time, it is important to add that, from 1945 until the late 1970s, the religion- or ethnicity-based identity of women in Yugoslavia was present in the folkloric tradition at best, though most commonly through the criticism of the pre-war societyâs backwardness, and particularly with reference to rural still traditional areas (opposite to the representation of the women of the 1990s). Despite the modernist and new socialist image of an independent, working woman who had all rights to decide about herself and to choose her way of life, Jugoslovenka (the Yugoslav woman), was instead, due to survival of patriarchy in socialism, double burdened (inside and outside the home). This pointed to the problem that the new woman of the Socialist era Jugoslovenka had to face.
The history of socialist state, leftist achievements and social changes showed that the symbolic value of the pater was in socialism appropriated by the party, which in fact initiated the collapse of the Socialist Revolution brought about by World War II. What also points out to the beginning of the counter-revolution, which finally led to the 1990s wars in, is the (self-)abolition of one of Europeâs most large-scale anti-fascist womenâs movementâAntifaĹĄistiÄki front Ĺžena (Womenâs Antifascist Front, abbrev. AFĹ˝). Established in 1942, it ceased to exist in 1953 under the pressure of the politics of classless and universal society, which proved to be de facto false in its primary principleâthe equality of men and women. However, the cause of the abolishment of this womenâs movement and the accompanying demonisation of feminism can be traced all the way back to the beginning of World War II.
Revisiting the archival records from the periods of interwar and Socialist Yugoslavia and acknowledging the rising number of research publications which deal with and thus reveal the history of Yugoslav feminism make it clear that history repeats the practice of doing away with women politics. Participants in this process of âbreaking upâ with interwar feminism also include new womenâs movement which joined KomunistiÄka partija Jugoslavije (Communist Party of Yugoslavia, abbrev. KPJ) in World War II. Severing connections with the far active feminist interwar movements, the newly formed Ĺ˝enski sekretarijat KPJ (Womenâs Secretariat of KPJ) took over most of the feminist demands and transformed them into the issue of the class struggle. The Fifth Land Conference of KPJ (1940) officially denounced femini...