Intersekcionalni zakon čitanja ženskog dnevnika: subjektivnost iskaza, moć riječi i topos ratnog užasa

Abstract

The focus of this research paper is on post-Yugoslav women’s prose, or more precisely, the genre of diaries written by women which take the disintegration of Yugoslavia as their topic. This form of writing on the horrors of war distingushes itself through certain key attributes: female experience in itself needs to be articulated as the subject of the material, bearing witness to the uncertainty of the future or existential threat, and resisting and destabilizing the patriarchal and militaristic mechanism of war. The diary as a genre of writing about life needs to be intersectionally disassembled and studied from the trans-national standpoint, in the context of the topic and the act of writing. The diary is determined not only by the historical context from which it originates, but also by the cultural matrix and opposing stereotypes that find their basis in writing about sex and gender in the text. Although the genre is primarily associated with a woman’s act of writing in the privacy of her home, together with the fact that many more women than men were active in this genre, it is still the case that men tend to take over in the genre-forcing the image of the soldier as a social paradigm. Despite the generally accepted limitations in the study of women authors overall, it is crucial to construct a different theoretical framework based on the consciousness of the gender designation of the author, the study of the dualities of private and public, the personal and the political, the individual and the collective and the social and the cultural; the position that censorship takes and the marginalization of female experience, the analysis of discourse and points where a particular self is imprinted into the body of text. A woman’s self, just like her identity, is a category that not only defines the text of the diary, but the author’s position as well, which adds up to the practice of the destabilization of the traditional norm of the genre and its features. These categories define the role of a woman in literature, her affirmation in the articulation of her creativity and her alternative knowledge, which are a staple for social transformation.