Abstract
Chapter 5 focuses on understanding how the Yugoslav wars impacted Yugoslav feminism and anti-nationalism in the early 1990s and thereafter, including the emergence of one of the most important women activist groups of the region, Women in Black. The Yugoslav wars were not only waged between different religious and ethnic factions, but against all minorities that defied the newly sanctified identity categories imposed on them. These ideological impositions included ethnic purity, the role of women as mothers serving the nation, a willingness to sacrifice for the national good, a belief in the exceptional status, victimhood, and righteousness of re-established or newly formed nations, and the condoning of violence to protect and advance said nations and their leaders. Women’s bodies were instrumentalized to serve as physical and symbolic battlegrounds upon which military and paramilitary men sadistically sought revenge and humiliated their enemies. Centering on women’s distressed positions as survivors of civil war and on the loss of a homeland, this chapter expands the field of inquiry to include popular images of Yugoslav women during the wars, including beauty contestants and soldiers/snipers, as well as Vesna Pavlović’s photographs of Women in Black’s activism. It ends with case studies of women performance artists, such as Šejla Kamerić, Lala Raščić, Tanja Ostojić, and Selma Selman, whose works touch on the wide-ranging challenges Jugoslovenkas face in the post-Yugoslav, postwar, neoliberal space: increased homophobia; immigration nightmares; diasporic loneliness; heightened racism, especially for Roma women; and a return to Yugoslav legacies of emancipatory strength and antifascist resistance.
Published Version
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