Femininity, patriarchy and resistance in the postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

Acknowledging that womanhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has traditionally meant complying with the more or less rigid patriarchal norm, especially when a war came to an end, this paper seeks to contextualize current female identities in the postwar BiH by assessing women's discourses with respect to femininity-in-patriarchy and perceived resistance mechanisms. After WWII, modernity and industrialization of the ex-Yugoslav society resulted in a greater equality and emancipation of women only to be reversed by the increased retraditionalization, repatriarchalization and poverty that ensued after the 1992–1995 Bosnian conflict. Such a situation only made it worse for all women in BiH irrespective of their ethnicity or religion and suggested that social class is a more important determinant in coping with the patriarchal legacies and emancipatory demands. Presuming discourse to be both socially determined and socially determinative when it comes to attitudes, identities and agency, this triangulated study combined available data from previous social research on women in the region with six focus groups of BiH women of different social status. The obtained transcripts were then analyzed in the manner of critical discourse analysis (CDA) in order to see what resistance discourses and strategies they used on a day-to-day basis when it came to surviving under and subverting the conditions of oppression.