Belgrade, 1978. Remembering the conference «Drugarica Zena. Zensko Pitanje – Novi Pristup?»/ «Comrade Woman.The Women’s Question: A New Approach?» thirty years after

Abstract

Between the 27th and the 29th of October 1978 the international conference “Drugarica Zena. Zensko Pitanje: Novi Pristup?” - “Comrade Woman. Women’s question: a new approach?” - took place in Belgrade, at the Students Cultural Centre (SKC). The first autonomous second wave feminist event in South-Eastern and Eastern Europe, it is still considered a landmark of feminist history in the former Yugoslavia thirty years later. In 1978 the conference was attended by a number of guests from Western Europe, and aroused the curiosity of feminist reviews and magazines in France, Italy and England. Thirty years later, however, this event is publicly remembered only by feminist groups within post-Yugoslav successor states, while its memory faded elsewhere. These complex dynamics of remembering and forgetting are linked to geopolitical changes that took place on a global level, and most importantly in the region of the former Yugoslavia itself. By first reconstructing the history of this event, and then by looking at its memories thirty years after, I theorise about the effect of geopolitical and historical transformations over transnational feminist exchanges between (former) Yugoslavia and Western Europe. Chapter 1 contains the theoretical and methodological premises of the research: discourses of Balkanism and “nesting orientalisms” are considered, and particularly their gendered character. The issue of the “Western gaze” towards the “Balkans” is discussed, as well as the way in which certain Western feminist interventions reproduced balkanist patterns and genres. The methodological section includes a discussion of the process of combining oral history and feminist methodology. Chapter 2 contains a historical overview of gender relations and women’s movements in socialist Yugoslavia, from the end of Second World War until the late Seventies, overview that permits to better contextualise the meeting of 1978. In chapter 3, the conference is reconstructed as an historical event through press sources and archive material. In chapter 4 and 5, key passages from the twelve interviews with local and international participants are assembled, in order to analyze the memories of the meeting thirty years later.