CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Jelusic, Iva |
|---|---|
| Title | Gender and War in the Yugoslav Media: The Figure of the Partizanka in the Making of the Yugoslav New Woman |
| Summary | The woman as a participant of the People’s Liberation Struggle (Narodnooslobodilačka borba, NOB) became one of its symbols of memory. She was also recognized as the originator of an emancipation process rooted in Marxist doctrine. This dissertation focuses particularly on one group of women who participated in the war, the partizanke, and the memory of them as it was constructed and developed primarily in the printed press and connected to the idea of women’s emancipation. My main interest is in the connection between the wartime symbol of women’s ultimate advance into the male dominion – the female soldier – and the creation, elaboration, and devaluation of the Yugoslav New Woman in the postwar period. I focus my analysis on the four magazines that became popular among Yugoslav audiences, especially women, under the various political and social circumstances of Yugoslavia’s existence. I analyze two magazines edited by women for women, the educational women’s magazine Žena u borbi (Woman in Combat), published by communist activist women and the fashion magazine Svijet (World), inspired exclusively by Western trends. The other two magazines – the family weekly Arena and the only Yugoslav men’s magazine Start – were edited (predominantly) by men, and although they did not cater to the interests of their female readers, they were regularly purchased by large numbers of women. The study finds that the editors-in-chief and editorial teams profiled each of the explored magazines as an opinion platform. Accordingly, each of the selected magazines developed their own take on the memory culture of the NOB, which resulted in distinctive documentary projects that, in the words of Joke Hermes, offered their readers very specific “interpretive repertoires.” Although partizanke tended to believe that “equality was in the četa,” this research shows that such a consideration was not widely accepted. Moreover, although both men and women regarded the position in the fighting ranks the most prestigious during the war, this was not reflected for women in the postwar era. When representing a symbol of wartime femininity, the journalists subjected the achievements of the NOB to processes of reinterpretation in accordance to the different definitions of women’s emancipation and equality in Yugoslavia. |
| Supervisor | Iordachi, Constantin |
| Department | History PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/jelusic_iva.pdf |
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