Women S Authorship In Interwar Yugoslavia

This book highlights the extent to which women were positioned as historical subjects in the process of constructing political, social, and cultural history in Yugoslavia, while simultaneously facing the politics of institutional exclusion and academic ignorance of progressive ideas and emancipatory struggles. To this effect, the book interprets a series of works written in interwar Yugoslavia by women or about women's position in public space. The research corpus is varied, including LGBT literature, autobiographies, travelogues, literary correspondence, political writings, parody, bibliographies and dictionaries, etc. The book argues that women have been programmatically made absent from the so-called universal canon of (post)Yugoslav literature, or else negatively valorised or labeled, while at the same time women's writing in interwar Yugoslavia reflected, articulated and mapped significant social, political and cultural issues. The book proposes a re-reading of the once censored and forgotten texts to counter the politics of exclusion that operates even today in the post-Yugoslav space. This re-reading is carried out in the light of contemporary feminist theories and aims to reveal and emphasise the emancipatory importance of women's authorship. In this way, Jelena Petrović provides a fresh perspective on the topical issue of the still contested (post)Yugoslav space.

This book highlights the extent to which women were positioned as historical subjects in the process of constructing political, social, and cultural history in Yugoslavia, while simultaneously facing the politics of institutional exclusion and academic ignorance of progressive ideas and emancipatory struggles. To this effect, the book interprets a series of works written in interwar Yugoslavia by women or about women’s position in public space. The research corpus is varied, including LGBT literature, autobiographies, travelogues, literary correspondence, political writings, parody, bibliographies and dictionaries, etc. The book argues that women have been programmatically made absent from the so-called universal canon of (post)Yugoslav literature, or else negatively valorised or labeled, while at the same time women’s writing in interwar Yugoslavia reflected, articulated and mapped significant social, political and cultural issues. The book proposes a re-reading of the once censored and forgotten texts to counter the politics of exclusion that operates even today in the post-Yugoslav space. This re-reading is carried out in the light of contemporary feminist theories and aims to reveal and emphasise the emancipatory importance of women’s authorship. In this way, Jelena Petrović provides a fresh perspective on the topical issue of the still contested (post)Yugoslav space.

The thirteen critical and well-documented chapters of Women, Work and Activism examine women’s labor struggle from late nineteenth-century Portuguese mutual societies to Yugoslav peasant women’s work in the 1930s, and from the Catalan labor movement under the Franco dictatorship to workplace democracy in the United States. The authors portray women's labor activism in a wide variety of contexts. This includes spontaneous resistance to masculinist trade unionism, the feminist engagement of women workers, the activism of communist wives of workers, and female long-distance migration, among others. The chapters address the gendered involvement of working people in multiple and often precarious and unstable labor relations and in unpaid labor, as well as the role of the state and other institutions in shaping the history of women’s labor. The book is an innovative contribution to both the new labor history and feminist history. It fully integrates the conceptual advances made by gender historians in the study of labor activism, driving home critiques of Eurocentric historiographies of labor to Europe while simultaneously contributing to an inclusive history of women’s labor-related activism wherever to be found. Examining women’s activism in male-dominated movements and institutions, and in women’s networks and organizations, the authors make a case for a new direction in gender history.

What makes up a public, what governs dominant discourses, and in which ways can counterpublics be created through narrative? This edited collection brings together essays on affect and narrative theory with a focus on the topics of gender and sexuality. It explores the power of narrative in literature, film, art, performance, and mass media, the construction of subjectivities of gender and sexuality, and the role of affect in times of crisis. By combining theoretical, literary, and analytical texts, the contributors offer methodological impulses and reflect on the possibilities and limitations of affect theory in cultural studies.

This social, cultural, and political history of Slavic Muslim women of the Yugoslav region in the first decades of the post-Ottoman era is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of the issues confronting these women. It is based on a study of voluntary associations (philanthropic, cultural, Islamic-traditionalist, and feminist) of the period. It is broadly held that Muslim women were silent and relegated to a purely private space until 1945, when the communist state “unveiled” and “liberated” them from the top down. After systematic archival research in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, and Austria, Fabio Giomi challenges this view by showing: • How different sectors of the Yugoslav elite through association publications, imagined the role of Muslim women in post-Ottoman times, and how Muslim women took part in the construction or the contestation of these narratives. • How associations employed different means in order to forge a generation of “New Muslim Women” able to cope with the post-Ottoman political and social circumstances. • And how Muslim women used the tools provided by the associations in order to pursue their own projects, aims and agendas. The insights are relevant for today’s challenges facing Muslim women in Europe. The text is illustrated with exceptional photographs.

This book is part of an ongoing transnational turn in cultural history. Studies on the history of urban popular culture and the entertainment industries increasingly engage with the European or global circulation of genres, actors, and shows, especially during the period of massive growth and expansion of the sector from the 1870s to the 1930s. Nevertheless, a large part of this research remains focused on exchanges between Western and Central European, and North American metropolises. To provide a fuller picture of the emergence and cross-border transfer of different genres of popular culture, this volume investigates Northern, East Central, and Southern European cities and their relations with each other and the West. The authors analyze the mediating agents, transnational networks, and local responses to new forms of entertainment from Madrid to Vyborg, and from Istanbul to Reykjavík. These examples re-focus the history of urban popular culture in Europe in view of multidirectional transfers and a wider range of regional experiences. Urban Popular Culture and Entertainment will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in the history of popular culture in modern societies, particularly those studying urban centers in Europe, and their transnational and transregional connections.

This book uncovers some of the major moments in the fragile and still poorly known herstory of feminist lesbian engagement in Serbia and Croatia. By treating the trauma of war, homophobia, and neoliberal capitalism as a verbally impenetrable experience that longs to be narrated, this monograph explores the ways in which feminist lesbian language has repeatedly emerged in the context of strong patriarchal silencing that has surrounded the armed conflicts of the Yugoslav succession. With an abundance of empirical material, Bilić illuminates a range of courageous but sometimes contested and controversial activist responses to the challenges posed by the violent intersection of misogyny, lesbophobia, poverty, and nationalism. The book renders visible a surprising diversity of activist initiatives and the resilience of transnational affective ties, which testify to the creativity of lesbian activist mobilisations in the ambivalent semi-peripheral space that used to be Yugoslavia. Trauma, Violence, and Lesbian Agency in Croatia and Serbia will be of interest to scholars and students researching the history and politics of Eastern Europe, as well as to those working in the fields of political sociology, lesbian and gay studies, gender studies, and queer theory and activism.

The era between World Wars I and II set East-Central Europe on a path of a modernization that was opening up numerous possibilities for challenging the region's traditional politics and established gender roles. In interwar Yugoslavia, questions of ethnically driven nationalism dominated the public discourse, but the modernizing processes of industrialization and rising consumerism also opened up a small public space for the development of the women's press. The intuitive and change-driven Croatian journalist and novelist Marija Juric Zagorka led this parallel and alternative public discourse in Yugoslavia's most popular interwar women's magazine, Zenski list. Forging the Bubikopf Nation is a book about this magazine, its editor, and its readers as well as about the alternative visions of modernity that they were offering to the magazine's readers, both throughout Yugoslavia and within the diasporic communities in the United States and Canada during the thirteen years of the magazine's existence from 1925-1938. Sensitively written, but researched with great methodological rigor and from a range of theoretical perspectives, this is a must-read book for all of those who are interested in mass communication, history, gender, and politics and for those who want to better understand this pivotal time in the history of a highly complex and intriguing part of the world.