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The Creation Of The New Yugoslav Woman – Emancipatory Elements Of Media Discourse From The End Of World War II

The Creation Of The New Yugoslav Woman – Emancipatory Elements Of Media Discourse From The End Of World War II

The end of WWII is the period of construction of the new Yugoslav woman who actively participates in the war, educates herself and enters the world of work, whilst the emancipation of women from the shackles of patriarchal culture was one of the “undisputable tasks of the Antifašistička Fronta žena (AFŽ).1 In that period, which saw an historical breakaway from… Read more → 

The Role And The Position Of The People’s (Progressive) Teacher In The Crucial Years For The Construction Of A New Socialist Society In Bosnia And Herzegovina

The Role And The Position Of The People’s (Progressive) Teacher In The Crucial Years For The Construction Of A New Socialist Society In Bosnia And Herzegovina

ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ME LUVLY TEACHER, I BELIEVE IN YOU.1 1. Introduction Early debates on the invisibility of women in Yugoslav history were initiated as late as the mid-1980s2 and the greatest contribution to the promotion and strengthening of feminist historical research of autonomous women’s organisations and associations was made by the late Lydia Sklevicky, the feminist theorist… Read more → 

AFŽ Activists’ Biographies: An Intersectional Reading of Women’s Agency

AFŽ Activists’ Biographies: An Intersectional Reading of Women’s Agency

Introduction The experience of entering an archive is always an affective experience, an encounter. As Antoinette Burton notes, “history is not merely a project of fact-retrieval (…) but also a set of complex processes of selection, interpretation, and even creative invention – processes set in motion by, among other things, one’s personal encounter with the archive, the history of the… Read more → 

From Revolutionary to Productive Subject: An Alternative History of the Women’s Antifascist Front

From Revolutionary to Productive Subject: An Alternative History of the Women’s Antifascist Front

But you, when at last it comes to passThat man can help his fellow man,Do not judge usToo harshly.—Brecht 1. Introduction, or Beginning After the End of History – Thinking the Women’s Antifascist Front Again and Anew Thinking the Women’s Antifascist Front (henceforth AFŽ) today, 74 years after its formation and 63 years after its “dissolution”, requires a lot more than… Read more → 

Glossary, Acronyms and Periodicals

AVNOJ Anti-Fascist Council of People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia AFŽ Women’s Antifascist Front afežeovke members and activists of the Women’s Antifascist Front CC CPY Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia chetniks Serb-nationalist rebels, in particular members of Draža Mihailović’s ‘Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland’ DFJ Democratic Federal Yugoslavia feredža burka, a veil covering the face and body worn by Muslim… Read more → 

Heroism of Labor: The Anti-Fascist Front of Women and the Socialist Dispositive 1945–1953

Heroism of Labor: The Anti-Fascist Front of Women and the Socialist Dispositive 1945–1953

Introduction Any attempt to understand and valorize the rise and decline of the Anti-Fascist Women’s Front in Yugoslavia (AFŽ) today is faced with the question of how to read and comprehend the organization’s archive. The problem is broader, however, and has to do not only with the AFŽ archive, but also with the archive as an institution that enables contemporaneity… Read more → 

About the Illustrations

“To render women visible is the first step towards questioning the customary relations between the general and the particular in the hierarchy of relevance in the writing of history.”1   Not only is there precious little material on the political activities of women, what little we have has been neglected and is on the verge of disappearing completely. One of… Read more → 

Socialists Think

Socialists Think

In the debates of the contemporary left, interventions often start with a variation on a particular theme: “Socialists think that…” Sometimes it is, “Marxists believe that…” Sometimes, “Socialists understand that…” Whatever the wording, the point is the same.