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.
TRINTRODUCTION
by Svetlana Slapsak, Jelisaveta Blagojevic and Katerina Kolozova
I
THEORIES FROM SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE
JELISAVETA BLAGOJEVIC, Taking Place of Love: Borderlines of Subjectivity
LADA CALE FELMAN, The Aura of the Actress
RADA IVEKOVIC, The Fiction of Gender Constructing the Fiction of Nation: On How Fictions are Normative, and Norms Produce Exceptions
JASNA KOTESKA, Expanding of the Subject
TIJANA MILOSAVLJEVIC CAREVIC, Identity and Liberal Culture
MIGLENA NICOLCHINA, The Lost Territory: Parables of Exile in Julia Kristeva
ZARANA PAPIC, Women in Serbia: Post-Communism, War, and Nationalist Mutations
MISKO SUVAKOVIC, Performing Gender Identities
II
THEORIES FROM/ON SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE
SIMONA CUPIC, The Politics of Representation as a Projection of Identity: Female Body in Context of its Oriental Construction in Serbian Art
DUBRAVKA DJURIC, The Construction of the Heterosexual and Lesbian Identity in Poetry
KATERINA KOLOZOVA, Identities of Irony and Crisis: Of the New Peculiar Processes of Re-balkanization of the Balkan
ADRIANA ZAHARIJEVIC, The Question of Life: Human Rights vs. Rights of Man
III
THEORIES ON SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE
MILICA G. ANTIC, KSENIJA H. VIDMAR, The Construction of Woman's Identity in Socialism: The Case of Slovenia
DAMIR ARSENIJEVIC, AJLA DEMIRAGIC and JELENA PETROVIC, Women Writing in Red Ink: Women’s Writing and Socio-political Change in Bosnia and Hercegovina, Croatia and Serbia
AKSU BORA, Feminism in Turkey: Boundaries and the Possibility of Infringement
BILJANA DOJCINOVIC-NESIC, De-centered Pluralism of Methods: Feminist Literary Criticism in Serbia
DASA DUHACEK, Gender Perspectives on Political Identities in Yugoslavia
ANCA GHEAUS, Conflictual Identities. Reflection on the Moral Experience of Transitional Societies
DIMITAR KAMBUROV, The Handicapped Under Part of Europe: (En)Gendering Regional In-betweenes
VJOLLCA KRASNIQUI, Gender and The Politics of Peacekeeping in Kosovo
NIRMAN MORANJAK BAMBURAC, Is There War in ‘l’écriture de guerre’?
MIHAELA MUDURE, Zeugmatic Spaces: East/Central European Feminisms
TATJANA ROSIC, The Father/Son Relationship: On Constructing Masculinity in the Contemporary Serbian Novel
SVETLANA SLAPSAK, Theorizing Women’s Mobility in the Balkans
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
THEORIES FROM AND/OR ON SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE
Editors |
Jelisaveta Blagojevic Katerina Kolozova Svetlana Slapsak |
|
Publishers |
ATHENA – Advanced Thematic Network in Women`s Studies in Europe and 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 Gender Research Center) |
|
Language Editing and Proof Reading |
Damir Arsenijevic Mery Ellen Schmider |
|
Design |
Snezana Skundric |
|
Cover page |
Svetlana Slapsak (collage) |
|
Layout |
Dragana Petrovic |
|
Press |
KaktusPrint, Belgrade 2006 |
|
Circulation |
500 ISBN: 86-86513-00-X |
|
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 Projects of the European Commission through grant number 110052-CP-1-2004-2-NL-ERASMUS for the ATHENA Advanced Thematic Network in Women's Studies in Europe |