Gender and Identity

Gender and Identity
Theories from and/or on Southeastern Europe

Trintroduction
By Jelisaveta Blagojevic, Katerina Kolozova and Svetlana Slapsak

This publication has been made possible with the support of the:
OSI Network Women`s Program, New York
and
Socrates/Erasmus/Programme for Thematic Network Project of the EU - ERASMUS for ATHENA

Published by:

ATHENA - Advanced Thematic Network
in Activities in Women`s Studies in Europe

Regional Network for
Gender/Women`s Studies in Southeastern Europe

(For the Network:
Research Center in Gender Studies,
Skopje and Belgrade Women`s Studies
and ender Research Center)

SVETLANA SLAPSAK

This collection is hardly an original attempt to de-universalize the theory, to locate the knowledge, to deconstruct the colonizing narratives: and it is, however, a rare attempt. The global academic world is ruled by the Anglo-American paradigm, made prevalent by a simple power&money based publishing machine, which is not much more merciful towards “Western European” than it is toward the rest of “European”, and certainly much less so around the edges of “European” or beyond. The real problem emerges when the power is interpreted and imposed as the academic criterion. In this sense, we “inscribe” ourselves into the read and the readable, without the support of a powerful disseminating mechanism, which by itself diminishes the charted territories of the read and the readable, and leaves our inscription in the white or in the grey – the non- and the less-charted. The appropriation of the knowledge therefore is partial, the reasonable solution is to make it partisan.

Thinking in English, or in any other language of cultural power can be idealized, as in the case of our imagining of the Ancient global bilingual or trilingual model (Greek+Latin+native), or critically reflected, as in the case of modern post-colonial theories. The partisan way would be to programmatically inscribe - as Rada Ivekovic proposed a long time ago, when she reflected on the Yugoslav concept of non-alignment and the Third World: then, we had a problem to identify with a political piece of invention that could hardly confront harsh realities of the lack of concrete cultural communication and exchange with the Third World, and also the underlying racism – but most of all, an ethical dilemma of accepting anything conceptual coming from the circles of nomenklatura. Now, in the absence of the realityrelated guilt, we could try to rethink it in the partisan context. The double semantic play with the word partisan, meaning open political positioning, and the local historic reference, a re-evaluation of the term that lost most of its ethical potency in the span of one sole human life, is a challenge in itself. We are on the grounds of empowering techniques here, in the working out-sweating section, which should be re-contextualized in the painful European struggle to dignify the running debates on nazism and fascism, especially in several newly joined states.