Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist ... - MailChimp

Feminist place(s) were re-invented in the midst of wartime, liberated
of any concreteness of the places, although by intention very contextualised.
Sarajevo-Zagreb-Deutschland-Sarajevo or Belgrade-Sarajevo-Budapest- Zagreb-
Belgrade, these were some determined roads of Nirman and Žarana’s travelling,
but many more crossroads gave a meaning to their re-placement. And the
crossing divide. By this, both of them, along with others [us/we] functioned
as “travelling selves”, witnessing ‘unbelonging’ that became, in Homi Bhabha’s
sense 20 , an ultimate condition of critical political and theoretical activity. This
situatedness at the same time meant feminist positioning and critical selflocation.
Žarana, who was a consistent feminist critic of the Serbian nationalistic
regime, wrote at the end of 1990s: “A nationalist/fascist discourse and order
of the body, re-traditionalising gender roles, and reconstructing aggressive
masculinity, were a vital symbolic precondition for the wars in ex-Yugoslavia –
for the strategies of the destruction, cleansing, displacing, torturing, violating
of the body of the Other(s)” 21 ; Nirman, who was a passionate critic of war
rhetoric, addressed the significant question a few years later: “To what degree
is every question on sex/gender regimes – heretical, and thus bearable at all for
great narratives, which are often taken as an excuse for violence?” 22 .
Both positions correspond in a way, although a serious analysis and
critical comparison should be made. By exposing an act of feminist resistance
that is embedded within the ‘shelters’ of counter-narratives, they extended
a meaning of engagement giving a possibility for the acts of Other(s) [us].
Feminist autobiography stands out as a certainty in all its expositions.
What are the semantic places that open up space for autobiographical
memory, for emotional reception, for personal journeys, for intervention? In
Greek, the verb nostalghó means both “the journey” and “the return” as well as
“feeling pain” in terms of longing for return. In this sense “(…) nostalgia is
linked to the personal consequences of historicising sensory experience which
is conceived as a painful bodily and emotional journey” 23 .
Dealing with loss, is it that kind of journey? And can I be an appropriate
appraiser of this?
20
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 9.
21
Žarana Papić, “Europe after 1989: Ethnic Wars, the Fascistization of Civil Society and Body Politics in Serbia,” in
Thinking Differently. A Reader in European Women’s Studies, ed. Gabriele Griffin and Rosi Braidotti (London & New
York: Zed Books, 2002), 139.
22
Nirman Moranjak-Bamburać, “Hasanaginica’s Heritage,” Treća [The Third], Vol. 7 (1-2) (2005). Nirman
Moranjak-Bamburać, Retorika tekstualnosti (Rhetoric of Textuality) (Sarajevo: Buybook, 2003).
23
Seremitakis, Ibid., 137.
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