Feminist Counterpublic and its Genres: Continuity of Women’s Political Engagement in the two Yugoslav states

Type: 
Lecture
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Nador u. 15
Room: 
104
Friday, November 23, 2018 - 5:15pm
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Date: 
Friday, November 23, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm

The CEU Yugo-Region Research Group, the CEU Department of History, the CEU Pasts, Inc. Center for Historical Studies, and the CEU Department of Gender Studies
cordially invite you to a lecture by

Stanislava Barać  

 Feminist Counterpublic and its Genres: Continuity of Women’s Political Engagement in the two Yugoslav states

 In this talk, feminist literary historian Stanislava Barać explains the concepts of female portrait genre and new woman, as well as New Woman Literature, and explores the connection between literary genres and women's political activism.

 The talk is divided in two parts. First, by examining the concept of female portrait genre and the portraits of new woman in Yugoslav women’s periodicals from 1919 until 1941, the speaker argues that these concepts and genres are useful for enhancing our understanding of the whole interwar epoch, and the emancipatory processes of the time: the portrait of the (new) woman varied and was strongly conditioned by different active emancipatory ideologies (radical, moderate and proletarian feminism; communism; pacifism; antifascism). Secondly, the talk explains how the phenomenon of the New Woman Literature could be a fruitful field and innovative analytical tool for the further research of the historical continuity of women’s emancipation in Yugoslavia. In her ongoing research, the speaker explores how politically engaged literature (novels, short stories and memoirs) of four authors – Mitra Mitrović, Milka Žicina, Nadežda Ilić Tutunović and Frida Filipović – can serve as a legitimate historical source in the understanding of the left-feminist revolutionary transformation from 1930s to the 1950s.

 In addition, the speaker will briefly present the scientific project The Role of Serbian Periodicals in the Formation of Literary, Cultural and National Models, within which her research is carried out.

 Stanislava Barac is a Research Associate at the Institute for Literature and Arts and coordinator of the project The Role of Serbian Periodicals in the Formation of Literary, Cultural and National Models. She has completed her graduate and postgraduate studies at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. Her main research areas are: Yugoslav literary and feminist periodicals, especially during the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes/Yugoslavia and during the 1990s, the development of female authorship within the South Slavic context, and historical avant-garde. She has authored two monographs: The Avant-garde Thought: Avant-garde Tendencies in the Journal Misao 1922–1923 (2008) and Feminist Counterpublic: The Genre of Female Portraiture in Serbian Periodicals 1920–1941. (2015).