Friday, May 16, 2025

2pm to 3pm (New York time)

In-person and on Zoom

Olivera Jokić

Associate Professor, English and Gender Studies, John Jay College,  CUNY

From Unlettered Women: Documenting Socialism’s Working Class Women Migrants

This workshop considers how we could account for the presence of working-class women in historical tableaux of Eastern Europe of the late twentieth century if those women have been difficult to heroize in dominant versions of feminist historiography and left behind scant documentation.

The workshop starts from material for biographical sketches of three women born to peasant families in the 1910s, across regions that were to become socialist Yugoslavia. These women were adults in the aftermath of World War II, when socialist Yugoslavia introduced its radical social policies that promised equal rights to women, from the vote to open access to education and property ownership. As a result of these policies, they spent much of their adult lives in the same small town in present-day Serbia. Far removed from the central theaters of social change and modernization, and too old to become “new women,” they made use of the new possibilities available to women in ways that existing historiographies of gender in the region and in so-called “communist Eastern Europe” have hardly mentioned.

Newly entitled to dispose of their property and to use their children’s education for social and geographic mobility, these women contributed to the network of intense migration in the mid-twentieth century Yugoslavia that shapes the politics of gender and urbanization in the region to this day, down to the neo-traditionalist demands for a “return to normal” and repolarization of gender categories that benefits a free-market society. The workshop will consider how historical change can register in the life narratives of these women, and how we can trace the changing conceptions of gender from the scarce materials at hand. Learning how to read the materials at hand, we learn how to do without the abstractions of feminist politics, state-mandated modernization, and apparent disappearance of a whole world committed to “socialism” or “emancipation.”

Olivera Jokić is a scholar of writing about gender and imagination, contacts between writers of fiction and documentation, constitution of archival collections and genres of experience. Most recently, she translated Past: An Introduction to the Problem (kuda.org + Iskra Books 2024), a collaborative book project about the work of filmmaker Želimir Žilnik as a body of knowledge about the real existing fantasy space that was socialist Yugoslavia.

2pm to 3pm 

Register here for Zoom

Or join us in person at the CUNY Graduate Center

365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016

5th floor, Room 5203