Gender And Nationalism In Serbi

Master's Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Politics - Region: Southeastern Europe, grade: 1.5, University of Bologna (and University of Sarajevo), language: English, abstract: [...] Reproductive and labour rights of women are of interest because they are mutually linked and reinforcing. Firstly, it is through reproduction policies and rhetoric that women are limited to their role in preserving the continuance of the nation. In turn, this serves the benefit of the demographic policies of ethnocracies. It is important to note that it is through these policies that hierarchical and patriarchal structures are reinforced. As a logical consequence, this is supposed to have an impact on the enjoyment of women's labour rights because following this argumentation, it is not in the interest of ethnocracies to involve women equally to men into paid labour but rather to reinforce their primary task of reproduction by discriminating them through certain policies related to the labour market. This is why the aim of this research is to analyse how these specific politics and policies related to reproduction and labour have affected the enjoyment of certain women's human rights. Therefore I will first review certain policies and politics of religious and nationalistic leaders to point out what initiatives they have undertaken in regards to women's reproductive rights. Moreover the thesis will elaborate the enjoyment of women's social, economic rights and cultural rights, such as labour rights (art.6 CESCR) and the right to family life (art.10 CESCR) that are set in the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights from 1966. Thus, it will be of interest to see how women's participation in the labour market has developed within the framework of changing political ideology and whether we can see significant developments not only for the question of whether women are being employed but also about which types of labour women are carrying out. [...]

Master's Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: South East Europe, Balkans, grade: 1.5, University of Bologna (and University of Sarajevo), language: English, abstract: ...] Reproductive and labour rights of women are of interest because they are mutually linked and reinforcing. Firstly, it is through reproduction policies and rhetoric that women are limited to their role in preserving the continuance of the nation. In turn, this serves the benefit of the demographic policies of ethnocracies. It is important to note that it is through these policies that hierarchical and patriarchal structures are reinforced. As a logical consequence, this is supposed to have an impact on the enjoyment of women's labour rights because following this argumentation, it is not in the interest of ethnocracies to involve women equally to men into paid labour but rather to reinforce their primary task of reproduction by discriminating them through certain policies related to the labour market. This is why the aim of this research is to analyse how these specific politics and policies related to reproduction and labour have affected the enjoyment of certain women's human rights. Therefore I will first review certain policies and politics of religious and nationalistic leaders to point out what initiatives they have undertaken in regards to women's reproductive rights. Moreover the thesis will elaborate the enjoyment of women's social, economic rights and cultural rights, such as labour rights (art.6 CESCR) and the right to family life (art.10 CESCR) that are set in the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights from 1966. Thus, it will be of interest to see how women's participation in the labour market has developed within the framework of changing political ideology and whether we can see significant developments not only for the question of whether women are being employed but also about which types of labour women are

This book examines the ways women politicians in Serbia and Kosovo have imagined, constructed, and politicised national identity and gender while engaging with politics in the context of the democratisation process. The first book to focus on the work of women inside political structures, it draws on participant observation and interview material to answer the question of how women in positions of power and influence deal with their national identity and gender in societies deeply divided along ethnic lines. Based on close studies of the work of a small number of women from different ethnic backgrounds, the author offers comparative analyses of the ways in which women politicians of different ethnicities respond to similar events in their everyday work. An original political ethnography that considers engagement of women in formal politics, this volume will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in political structures and political participation, particularly as these relate to questions of gender, nation and ethnicity.

In The Body of War, Dubravka Žarkov analyzes representations of female and male bodies in the Croatian and Serbian press in the late 1980s and in the early 1990s, during the war in which Yugoslavia disintegrated. Žarkov proposes that the Balkan war was not a war between ethnic groups; rather, ethnicity was produced by the war itself. Žarkov explores the process through which ethnicity was generated, showing how lived and symbolic female and male bodies became central to it. She does not posit a direct causal relationship between hate speech published in the press during the mid-1980s and the acts of violence in the war. Instead, she argues that both the representational practices of the “media war” and the violent practices of the “ethnic war” depended on specific, shared notions of femininity and masculinity, norms of (hetero)sexuality, and definitions of ethnicity. Tracing the links between the war and press representations of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, Žarkov examines the media’s coverage of two major protests by women who explicitly identified themselves as mothers, of sexual violence against women and men during the war, and of women as militants. She draws on contemporary feminist analyses of violence to scrutinize international and local feminist writings on the war in former Yugoslavia. Demonstrating that some of the same essentialist ideas of gender and sexuality used to produce and reinforce the significance of ethnic differences during the war often have been invoked by feminists, she points out the political and theoretical drawbacks to grounding feminist strategies against violence in ideas of female victimhood.

The essays in the volume consider the significance of nation and gender in the context of post-1989 transitions in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and in the context of post-partition India. The texts critique the ways in which narratives of nationhood and womanhood naturalize and essentialize difference and hierarchy. The authors explore uses of sexualized/gendered imagery in defining the space of the nation and sexualized/gendered metaphors of state fatherhood and motherhood in defining the distribution of power within that space. of the nation (e.g. feminized landscapes and battlefields) and sexualized /gendered metaphors of state fatherhood and motherhood in defining the distribution of power within that space. The particular histories of nationalism and partition are different in the countries involved, but commonalities in the narrative structures, state ad nation-building strategies, patriarchal patterns of control, and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are striking. This is particularly so with respect to the ways in which exclusive national identities are constituted through gendered representations of the nation and its members.

Women, the State, and War looks at the intersection of gender, citizenship, and nationalism; marriage, intermarriage, and how states gender that relationship; and the ways in which women are used as symbols to reinforce or further nationalistic goals. Women have long struggled with issues of citizenship, identity, and the challenge of being recognized as equal members of the community. Governments use feminine imagery (e.g., mother country) to create a national identity, while simultaneously minimizing the role that women play as productive contributors to the society. Authors Joyce P. Kaufman and Kristen P. Williams examine the relationship of government and women in four different countries: the United States, Israel, the former Yugoslavia, and Northern Ireland. In each case, numerous similarities appear: conflict plays a significant role in the definition of citizenship for women; women's movements have worked in contradiction to the state; and citizenship and marriage are gendered undertakings.

Providing a social science reading on the construction of nation, gender and sexuality, and on the interactions among them, this text offers both the masculine and feminine perspective. It exposes how nations are comprised of sexed bodies, and explores the gender ironies of nationalism.

This book describes, compares, explains, and contextualises the positionings, i.e. discourses and activities, which feminists in Belgrade, Serbia and Zagreb, Croatia produced in relation to the (post-)Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Two types of positionings are analysed: those which the feminists have produced on the (sexual) war violence and those which they have produced on each other. Applying a Bourdieuian framework and using interviews with key feminist and peace activists in the region alongside a thorough examination of organisational documents and printed media articles, Ana Miškovska Kajevska challenges the common suggestion that the outbreak of the war violence in 1991 led to the same reorganisation of the Belgrade and Zagreb feminist fields. She corrects the understanding that the activists in each city, who had up until then worked together without tensions, divided at the same time and in the same manner into antinationalists and nationalists and began clashing with each other because of the different war-related positionings. Miškovska Kajevska explains further that the terms ‘antinationalist’ and ‘nationalist’ were not completely value-free and objective, and had different meanings attached to them. These designations were an essential part not only of the local and international efforts to stop the (sexual) war violence, but also of the struggle for legitimacy among the feminists in each city – endeavours in which many Western (feminist) academics, activists, and funders were involved, too. In addition to providing insights into the situation in Croatia and Serbia, this book will also help increase the understanding of intra-feminist dynamics in other regions of the world which are dominated by nationalism and war violence, and where the work of the local feminists is closely intertwined with – and often dependent on – these activists’ contacts with foreign academic, funding, activist, and/or political entities.