Gadji Feminism(s) in Serbia: Racial Privilege and “Intersectional” Solidarity in an Eastern European Semiperiphery

Abstract

Abstract: In this paper, we follow Jelena Savić, the only Romani critical race theoretician, poet, and decolonial activist in Serbia in her call for unpacking the colonial legacy and whiteness behind the feminist politics. Accordingly, we trace the historical trajectory through which whiteness has been introduced into and became paradigmatic of specific post-Yugoslav Serbian feminist activism and theories. In line with Savić’s critique of the feminist politics in Serbia, we identify two types of gadji (non-Roma European) feminism(s): gadji saviorism and gadji performative solidarity . In the first section we outline the notion of gadji saviorism as an optics perceiving Roma women as victims of the purportedly backward Romani way of life and the supposed inherent poverty from which Roma women need to be “saved” or “uplifted” by the enlightened Eurocentric culture(s). We point both to similarities and differences between colonial-state antiziganist subjugation of Roma women and children in the Austro-Hungarian empire/kingdom and the contemporary Serbian feminist “savior politics” aligned with transnational European and national Serbian policies. In the second section, we look at the (post)socialist genealogies behind the concept which Savić identified as white feminist “performative solidarity” and its race-blind approach to both feminism and solidarity based on its (self)conflation with the ideology of “sisterhood and unity”. Our research shows how these ideas nested in the Serbian feminist scene following the fall of socialism and the end of Cold War.