Preliminary Programme

After the breakup of the Habsburg Monarchy the newly founded Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia) had unresolved borders.

Yugoslavia and Austria both claimed the southern part of Carinthia with its Slovene and German speaking population. From the end of 1918 until summer 1919 Yugoslav and Austrian troops fought in southern Carinthia. Finally the Peace Conference in Paris determined a plebiscite to be held on October 10, 1920. Its result turned out favorable for Austria.

At the end of 1918 Italian troops began to occupy the Julian March, a territory with predominantly Slovene and Croat speaking population, which had been promised to Italy for its entry into war in 1915. In contrast to Carinthia the population of the contested territory was not given the possibility to decide at a plebiscite. Due to political circumstances Yugoslavia in 1920 had to accept Italy’s gain of the Julian March.

These border conflicts are a central topic in contemporary history and historic memory of the region, but they have not yet been analyzed from a gender perspective. This perspective includes a variety of themes such as patriotic activities of women’s associations, the participation of women and men in military struggle, sexual violence etc. In my paper, based on textual and visual archival sources, I outline some of these (gendered) topics.

The military events in the border conflicts reinforced normative concepts of masculinity and femininity. Men were called upon to prove their patriotism and their manliness and bravely participate in the fighting, thus protecting the honor of themselves, their nation, and their women. On the other hand soldiers exerted sexual violence against women and the sexual behavior of women contributed to the constitution of national boundaries. Some women crossed the limits of gender roles and fought with arms. However, most women supported the fighting (men) in “traditional” ways – nursing, encouraging, cooking etc.

To participate in the Carinthian plebiscite of 1920 women were enfranchised. Both the Yugoslav and the Austrian side put particular emphasis on women voters and many topics of their propaganda were gendered. Women’s roles in private and public and their obligations toward the nation were fiercely discussed. Specially founded women’s associations organized national manifestations and charity festivities, published a newspaper etc.

Women’s patriotic activities crossed state and national borders: Slovenes cooperated with Croatian, Serb or even Czech women. Yugoslav women’s associations discussed the border questions in their meetings or organized demonstrations. They addressed the international public and the Allied Powers to resolve the border questions in a pro-Yugoslav way.

To conclude, I will argue in my paper that the linking of gender and nationalism research is very fruitful. It can alter the view on the construction of nations and drawing of state borders at the end of World War I and enlighten the hitherto little-known role of women in these processes. (Show less)

After the end of the cold war, the Nineties of the Twentieth Century have the hallmark of several local and regional particularistic conflicts, in which statements and researches of religious and nationalistic identities signed the new wars, often defined “ethnic” or “ethnocentric” to stress their being inside a community, even if this words are not proper for two reasons: first, behind the ethnic reason there is often a deeper and more rooted nationalistic assertion; second, the ethnic antagonism has been frequently used as justifying explanation of a violence which was indeed innovatory and more serious, such as the so called “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia – terms which, underlining a group expulsion from its land without reaching its intentional extermination as in a genocide, it is not really proper for the former Yugoslavia, where there was often an intentional extermination such as in Srebrenica or its will.
In this paper it will be analyzed women’s mass rape in Bosnia, stressing some peculiarities: the extreme violence up to genocide; the use of mass rape as proper weapon against women and thus civil society; the silence of victims (due also to ineffectiveness of local courts, inadequate protection of witnesses, forced life in common of victims and perpetrators within the same community and perpetrators’ will and capability of still being violent) and the uneasy construction of a female post violence reality, while silence probably accentuates victims’ unease and trauma, because they do not want and at the same time cannot be forced to speak – and it will probably take years, as for the Holocaust, to let the call for memory from society (above all where the violence occurred) meet the victim’s spontaneous will to talk.
Finally there will be some references to the international context which did not stop the violence because of the weak attitude of the other Countries and the United Nations (while jurisprudence and international justice lived an innovative elaboration), and of the often criticized but still important work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in comparison with the ineffectiveness of local courts. (Show less)

The paper addresses the process of naming or labelling among the feminists in Zagreb, Croatia, in the 1990s. The labels "anti-nationalist", "non-nationalist", "nationalist" and "patriotic", are very often found in the articles on (post-) Yugoslav feminist groups or, put more broadly, gender and ethnicity in (post-) Yugoslavia. While both local and foreign scholars use these labels to attend to the differences in the political standpoints between these feminists, (the significance of) the labels and the process of their assignment have not been thus far analysed in more detail. In this paper I aim to fill in some of that lacuna in the scholarship by presenting some of the initial findings of my research. (Show less)