1. A note on the Yugoslav gender regime

Picture 1. Stjepan Lahovski; Demonstration (Self-portrait as a female comrade in a procession), 1947.

In 1947, painter Stjepan Lahovski painted a self-portrait in gouache under the title Demonstration – Self-portrait as a comrade in a procession (Ilustration 1). He said, “That’s me, an old woman (baba)1 in an overcoat, a headscarf and military boots.” The author, who throughout his opus was involved in making self-portraits painted in different styles and techniques, taking over “the vesture of a certain historical style”, thought of himself as not being courageous and not having a sense for struggles and wars. Thus, in various self-portraits he sought to compensate for some qualities he did not have, such as youth and courage. Why then he portrays himself like an old woman in a scarf? Although his statement accompanying the picture can be understood as a mocking of old women participants of demonstrations, the painting still tells a lot about the models of depicting courage in that period. In addition to the famous heroic depictions of female Partisan as some kind of Amazons with guns in their hands, the depictions of women during the period of the People’s Liberation Struggle, as well as in the postwar period, included also images of old women with headscarves depicted as they learn to write, as they participate in elections and perform hard physical work, as we can see in the numerous illustrations in the Woman in the Struggle magazine2 (Ilustations 2, 3, 4). In its editorials, this magazine explicitly expressed the goal of creating and disseminating new models of femininity, which is in line with the very reason for the emergence of this “organ of the struggle”.

After the war, the position of women was more drastically changed than that of men, creating the need for a more precise creation of the character(s) of “new” women in order to consolidate them to the right place in the new society. The Partisan is not only an Amazon or a Spartan, but bent and stiff. However, persistent, hard working and brave. The figures of heroes and heroines aimed to be associated with an ethic of hard work, and gradually the heroism of work became the most prominent social value that replaced the heroism of the struggle. In the imagery of that time, women appear as heroes of socialist work, women in peasant cooperatives, women cutting the woods or working on afforestation. Although the organizers of the Anti-Fascist Front of Women (AFŽ) were mostly educated urban women, and among the “ordinary” fighters were women from the towns, the heroines represented were almost always as villagers, often shepherds. Besides the fact that this contrast (nescient villager oppressed by rural patriarchal relations→strong, emancipated fighter dedicated to the building of a new society) more explicitly emphasizes the transformative effect of the participation in the People’s Liberation Struggle, the character of an illiterate shepherd or an old woman makes the woman a kind of tabula rasa in which it is easier to incribe any desirable meaning. On the other hand, the urban intellectual differs much more from the traditional ideal of womanhood, and it can also bear associations of bourgeois habits, values ​​and lifestyles typical of the urban middle class from which she probably originates. By using the figure of a female comrade in a military overcoat and a headscarf for a self-portrait, Lahovski does two things: 1) he clears himself of his “negative” attributes – bourgeois lifestyle, cowardice, inadequate masculinity, “homosexuality” and the decadence and laziness associated with it3; and 2) shows that certain characters of the new woman – Partisans and heroines of labour – have in some way become iconic – symbols of certain values for the depiction of which certain recognizable models were always used. The fact that Lahovski somewhat ironically appropriates such a representation of women for the exploration of his own identity, already in 1947 suggests that the figure of the heroin of labour would quickly become emptied of its content.

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In an attempt to review the project of socialist Yugoslavia from an anarchist perspective, it would perhaps be enough to say that it was a state and in such a very simple way reduce the whole analysis to one short sentence. Of course, this would be an oversimplified understanding of the project that lasted more than 45 years and created a series of myths nurtured both by the left and the right which still today represents a part of the basis for their actions. We often hear that it is necessary to turn our backs to the past and concentrate on the future, but it is exactly the relation towards the past that determines what will the present and future be like. In the post-Yugoslav context, myths have a strong echo and influence on current happenings, whether they refer to real or imagined events.

The starting point and the motivation for this issue of Antipolitika wasn’t a search for the causes of the breakup of Yugoslavia or any kind of justification for that or any other regime. Yugoslavia was, as I said in the beginning, simply a state. It kept the continuity of statehood and institutions, whether we speak of Austro-Hungary, Kingdom of Serbia, Ottoman Empire, Kingdom of Montenegro, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and in the end, socialist Yugoslavia – the topic of this issue. When we take a look at the chronology of institutions of statehood in this region, we can see that everything continued, despite the wars, regime breakups, and occupations; the continuity of the State was ensured in every moment, and, of key importance for our antiauthoritarian position, not once was it put in question on a mass level. Everything that exists today has its starting point – legislative, institutional and even in terms of the cadre – in all previous regimes. In some way, we always speak of the continuation of the project of the State (and of Capital, without which it cannot survive); what exact name it has, and which ideological pattern it adopts, are more questions of the current strategy of the reproduction of existing relations of power, rather than of a more essential difference.

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The English language version of Issue 2 of Antipoltika is now also distributed by: AK Press UK, Active Distribution and Black Mosquito.