Book Launch: Zsófia Lóránd’s The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia (Palgrave, 2018)
Central European University
February 1st, 2019
17:30
Nádor 9, Gellner Room
Participants:
The author: Zsófia Lóránd (Lichtenberg Kolleg, University of Göttingen)
Discussants:
Jasmina Lukić (CEU, Budapest)
Ana Miškovska Kajevska (UvA, Amsterdam & IWM, Vienna)
Agnieszka Mrozik (CEU IAS/Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)
Moderation: Balázs Trencsényi (CEU, Budapest)
The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia is an intellectual historical account of the story of the feminist critique of Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s. Its focus is on the tension between the promise of women’s emancipation by state socialism and the unfulfilled equality through the lens of feminist intellectuals. Critical ideas of this unfulfilled promise stemmed from the productive encounter of discourses in the field of the social sciences, humanities, art and literary theory, as well as in art and literary practices, journalism and activism. Creatively writing across Marxism, the language of Yugoslav self-managing socialism, Marxist revisionism and a broad range of feminist thought, the Yugoslav feminists managed not only to bring to life a complex feminist language specifically targeting the reality of women in state socialist East Central Europe but also organised feminist activist groups and set up the fist SOS helplines for victims of domestic and gender based violence. Their work became the backbone of anti-war organising after 1991.