The Politics of Love and Struggle // lecture by Jelena Petrović
Dolac 8
Zagreb
From social imagination to political articulation //
Social and political understanding of love is the foundation of the emancipation that struggles against patriarchy and capitalism, especially when we talk about marriage and a family, then a female body, work and public life. In other words, social reproduction and material conditions of every day life in all their political, economical, cognitive, psychological and other forms and manifestations, speak about love as of an essentially feminist issue.
Yugoslav female authors of the interwar period (such as Marija Kokalj-Željeznova, Mila Žicina, Julka Hlapec Đorđević, Fedy Martinčić, Ljudmila Pivko, et al) showed how the politics of affect, social imagination and emancipatory struggles were important not just for the women's engaged authorship of the 1920s and 1930s, but also for a radical change of social everydayness. Already then women's struggle against routine power relations and depoliticized emotions instigated a number of questions to which the answers led towards consequent revolutionary societal change, especially the change of the position of women in a society.
The lecture about women's authorship in Yugoslavia in the interwar period will present some less known but very important examples of politics of love and struggle, politics that was parallelly constructed on all fronts from household to work.
Jelena Petrović
(translation to English: Sonja Leboš)
About author
Jelena Petrović is a feminist scholar, an art theorist and author. She is the research leader (PI) of the project: Art Geographies: The Politics of Belonging at the Institute of Art Theory and Cultural Studies, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (funded by the Austrian Science Fund through the Elise Richter Program 2019-2023). (Co)author of texts, events, exhibitions and projects related to (post)Yugoslav subjects – particularly with regard to social history, art-theory and feminism. She holds a Ph.D. form ISH-Ljubljana Graduate School for Humanities (2009). From 2008 to 2014 she was an active member of the new Yugoslav art-theory group Grupa Spomenik (The Monument Group). In 2011 she became co-founder and member of the feminist curatorial collective Red Min(e)d (www.redmined.org). As an initiator of the course Living Archive: Feminist Curatorship and Contemporary Artistic Practices she was taught at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana (2014-2017). From 2015 to 2017 She was appointed as the Endowed Professor for Central and South Eastern European Art Histories at Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Palgrave Macmillan published her book Women's Authorship in Interwar Yugoslavia. The Politics of Love and Struggle in 2019.
