The Politics of Love: Women’s Authorship in Yugoslavia Between the Two World Wars

The avant-garde and socially engaged literature between the two world wars in Yugoslavia demanded a new approach to the old topics, a new language and new people, freed of moral prejudices and social conventions. It was a challenge for many women writers to reach an emancipatory transformation of the discourse on love - in the light of all progressive thoughts that promised a freed society. In the times of a meaningful revolutionary movement closely connected to the emancipation of women, and to the society as a whole, one can talk about the beginnings of a new discourse on love as well as its praxis. The discourse on love which was conceptualized through a feminist lens, today gives rise to actual readings of many forgotten feminist authors and women writers of the Yugoslav interwar literature, such as: Julka Hlapec Đorđević, Marija Kokalj Željeznova, Boško Tokin and others and at the same time reflects a re-traditionalized matrix of the European values of society today. Dealing with some of these authors, the lecture intervenes in the field of ignorance of the literary canon as well as in the field of political amnesia. It explores the socially engaged idea of love that shifts in-between the public and private sphere shaped by a range of individual/collective/institutional power relations.

Jelena Petrović is (co)author of many scholarly articles, art-theory events, contemporary art exhibitions and cross-disciplinary projects relating to post/Yugoslav subjects – particularly to the mis/interpretative models of Yugoslav history, memory, culture, language and gender, moving toward new epistemological models of the knowledge production. She is co-editor of several publications: Gender, Literature and Cultural Memory in the Post-Yugoslav Space (2009), Feminism – Politics of Equality for All (2011), Yugoslav Feminisms (2011) and Critical Feminist Interventions – Thinking Heritage, Decolonizing, Crossing (2013). As an independent lecturer (assistant professor of anthropology) she is affiliated with the ISH, Ljubljana Graduate School for Humanities. She is also member of the international editorial board of Red Athena University Press and Belgrade's Journal for Women’s Writing and Culture Pro Femina, the art-theory group Grupa Spomenik/Monument Group and the feminist curatorial collective Red Min(e)d.