BB: The UN Decade for Women in Art in Socialist Yugoslavia.

The talk will explore the tensions between socialist state policies on the “woman question” and the rising discontent among neofeminists with the socialist project during the UN Decade for Women (1975–1985) in Yugoslavia. Drawing on the work of “revisionist feminist scholars,” who have rejected the totalitarian view on state socialism and its women's organisations dominant in Western historiography as a continuation of Cold War paradigm, and have demonstrated that the dynamics were more varied, diverse and complex than dominantly portrayed, I aim to highlight these tensions from the perspective of Marxist feminism.

First, I will examine the intellectual movements, conferences, publications and critical debates that originated in academia and later spread to the broader public sphere. As a second step, I will look at the exhibitions (and art production) of this period as a space where the contradictions between socialism and feminism can be explored. By juxtaposing art as a site of resistance with art as labour and a site of symbolic production (ideology), I will argue for the need to revisit feminist art history within socialist Yugoslavia, alongside feminist history more broadly. In conclusion, I will turn to Nancy Fraser’s call to integrate the “politics of redistribution” and the “politics of recognition” as a potentially fruitful theoretical framework for navigating the challenges of gender politics under socialism.

Vesna Vuković is a PhD candidate at the University of Zadar’s Department of Art History, with a dissertation titled “Women’s Visual Art Production, Feminism and the Cultural Logic of Late Socialism: Contradictions and Correlations”. Her research interests include modern and contemporary art relations with political and social movements, socially engaged art, and socialist and Marxist feminism.