Rejecting Angelina Jolie – and other Dilemmas for Women’s Activists: Gender and the Politics of Victimhood after the Bosnian War?

CELEBRATING THE 15TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF GENDER STUDIES AND THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF CEU
 
THE DEPARTMENT OF GENDER STUDIES PROUDLY PRESENTS THE LECTURE SERIES

VOICING GENDERS, ENGENDERING VOICES

“Rejecting Angelina Jolie – and other Dilemmas for Women’s Activists:
Gender and the Politics of Victimhood after the Bosnian War?”
A public lecture by
Elissa Helms
Professor, Department of Gender Studies

February 14, 2012, 3:30 am, Popper Room

Feminist critiques of nationalism have focused on the gendered foundations of nationalisms associated with oppressive political domination and often aggressive war violence that takes the symbolism of woman-as-nation to its logical extremes. Less well understood, especially in the case of the former Yugoslavia, is the relationship between gender and concepts of nation among victimized groups, despite the tendency of all nationalisms to portray their nations as victims. This talk examines the gendering of national narratives of identity and collective victimhood in the Bosniac dominated parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) as a challenging and ultimately restrictive context for women’s activism. I first outline the ways in which notions of victimhood and innocence are constructed upon essentialized representations of gender, particularly the figures of female victims of ethnic cleansing and wartime rape. I then discuss the limits and possibilities these framings present for different kinds of women’s activism in the Bosniac dominated areas of BiH where support for a multi-ethnic state is highest. I show this through an account of the “public life” of the figure of the female survivor of wartime rape, an issue that has again become visible in the local and international media since the mid-2000s, culminating in the controversy sparked by the filming of Angelina Jolie’s just released feature In the Land of Blood and Honey.

Elissa Helms holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh (2003) and has been a member of the Gender Studies faculty at CEU since 2004. Her research has examined various gendered aspects of post-war and post-socialist transformations in Bosnia-Herzegovina with a focus on women’s activism, representation, ethno-nationalism, and gender-based violence. Her publications have appeared in Slavic Review, Focaal, Women’s Studies International Forum, Nationalities Papers, and numerous edited collections. She is co-editor, with Xavier Bougarel and Ger Duijzings, of The New Bosnian Mozaic: Memories, Identities, and Moral Claims in a Post-war Society (Ashgate, 2007), a collection of local-level studies of post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina that problematizes dominant macro-political analyses of the country as defined by immovable ethnic cleavages. Elissa is also active in a variety of European and North American academic networks focused on issues like the study of borders, the anthropology of the former Yugoslavia, and the strengthening of scholarship and higher education in the region, especially in the areas of social science, anthropology, and gender studies.

The Voicing Genders, Engendering Voices lecture series is a joint celebration of the Department’s 15th anniversary and the 20th anniversary of CEU. The lecture series shares our diverse faculty’s most recent research with the wider academic community and showcases the multiple and interdisciplinary ways in which our field contributes to the themes of CEU’s university-wide celebrations: disciplinary self-reflexivity and academia’s social responsibility. Thus our lecture series is intended to contribute to the larger intellectual debates initiated in celebration of CEU’s 20th anniversary.