Authors

Discussion

Feminist intellectuals in Yugoslavia of the 1970s and 1980s formulated a criticism of one of the flagships of socialist modernisations, that of women’s emancipation. While in my interpretation their activity was a form of dissent, I also emphasise the difference between dissent and dissidence in the East Central European context. Building on this differentiation, my paper aims to show the ways in which a thorough feminist critique, expanding to a broad range of aspects of gender equality, balanced between a complete rejection of the socialist state and its politics and a constructive criticism, in hope of a dialogue built upon the promise of state socialist women’s emancipation. The political pre-history and contemporaneous context of the feminist critique is of high relevance here. We are almost a decade after 1968 (the student protests) and 1971 (the Croatian Spring), when a wave of retaliations were followed by a relative consensus of what was allowed, tolerated and forbidden. Feminism had its own ambiguous position in this situation in a state that promoted women’s emancipation but in the meantime, was deeply anti-feminist, deeming feminism bourgeois, Western and obsolete in light of the fulfilment of women’s equality in socialist Yugoslavia. While analysing the feminist arguments criticizing the state, I'll focus on the access to balance between the repercussions and possible dialogues feminist intellectuals encountered.