Description
Ample literature on the Yugoslav space has provided entries for the contraction and amplification of feminist solidarity in the face of nationalism and violence. Feminist solidarity across the Yugoslavia has both stood firmly against nationalist forces and also wavered upon masculinized territorialization. However, there has been little investigation on the uneasy relationship between feminist solidarity and nationalism in the case of Kosovo, as women and feminist associations organized for dual liberation: national and feminist. Local state-building processes and encounters of feminist state-building have been placed on the fringes of academic work and collective memory. Thus, this paper turns the gaze to feminist solidarities within activist networks in the 1990s in Kosovo. It particularly investigates how Yugoslav feminist solidarity was articulated in Kosovo in relation to the parallel state-building project undertaken in the 1990s. The analysis relies on content and discourse analysis of fieldwork in-depth interviews with prominent activists in Kosovo during the 1990s and narrative interviews of the Oral History Kosovo electronic archive. The paper aims to highlight an under-researched facet of Yugoslav feminist solidarity and add towards a conceptualization of feminist solidarity as a state-building practice in the Yugoslav space.
