Jasmina Tumbas
5 min
In this study, Jasmina Tumbas explores the intersection of feminism, socialism, and patriarchy within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945–1992). By centering the concept of the Jugoslovenka—the Yugoslav woman—the author examines how women utilized performance art, music, and visual culture to navigate and resist the specific gendered constraints of the socialist state. The book traces this legacy from the 1970s through the post-socialist era, demonstrating that feminist performance politics were not merely a reaction to state policy but a central component of Yugoslav cultural identity.
Tumbas employs a multidisciplinary approach, combining archival research, personal interviews, and in-depth visual analysis. The study covers a wide range of media, including conceptual art, war photography, music videos, and samizdat publications. By analyzing both celebrated figures like Marina Abramović and popular cultural icons like Lepa Brena and Esma Redžepova, the author highlights how diverse forms of cultural production served as sites of emancipatory resistance. The research also addresses the challenges faced by contemporary feminist artists in the Yugoslav diaspora following the wars of the 1990s.
This work is significant for its re-evaluation of the relationship between socialism and feminism in the 20th century. By positioning Yugoslavia as a unique case study—characterized by its West-leaning socialist policies and high levels of legal and labor mobility for women—Tumbas challenges monolithic views of Eastern European socialism. The book provides a vital resource for understanding how art can function as a political tool to preserve transnational and antifascist legacies in the face of nationalistic fragmentation and post-socialist transition.
Through the author's invocation of the figure Jugoslovenka (Yugoslav woman), this book reveals feminist performance politics in art and culture to be central to socialist Yugoslavia and traces that feminist legacy to the contemporary post-socialist era. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945–1992) provides one of the most intriguing examples of women's emancipatory power during twentieth-century socialism. The most politically West-leaning of all the socialist countries during the Cold War, Yugoslavia became a place where women enjoyed extraordinary legal rights and social mobility, including access to education and labor mobility. The book tells this remarkable story of women's emancipation during socialism, and also highlights its importance during and after the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s. Theorizing the concept of Jugoslovenka as the radical embodiment of Yugoslavia's antifascist, transnational, and feminist legacies, this book offers analyses of celebrated and lesser-known artists from the 1970s until today, including the now legendary performance artist Marina Abramović, along with stories of female snipers, music legends Lepa Brena and Esma Redžepova, and contemporary feminist artists forced to live in the Yugoslav diaspora during/after the wars. Based on archival work, interviews, and in-depth visual analyses, this book tells the unique story of Yugoslav women's resistance through the intersection of feminism, socialism, and patriarchy in visual culture. Discussing multiple media, such as war photographs, music videos, samizdat publications, performance and conceptual art, along with traditional paintings and film, the book will serve as an invaluable resource for researchers of women's cultural work in the region.
Sam: So if you were a woman artist in that system, how did you get your work taken seriously?
Alex: That was the core challenge. Many women found their work dismissed as soft or secondary compared to what was considered the serious political art being made by their male peers. So they had to navigate a scene that used the language of equality while quietly enforcing a hierarchy.
Sam: And their response was to use the state's own promises against it?
Alex: Yes. They used the legal standing the state had granted them to perform their own resistance — turning the official narrative back on its own contradictions.
Sam: Did that legacy survive the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s?
Alex: Tumbas argues it did. The research shows this tradition of resistance didn't disappear with the state. It moved into the diaspora, where women continued using these same performative strategies to process and articulate their experiences.
Sam: How does she actually track all of this? It spans decades and multiple media.
Alex: She uses a combination of archival research, personal interviews, and visual analysis. The source material ranges from war photographs and music videos to conceptual art installations. She looks at well-known figures like Marina Abramović alongside lesser-known artists who were working in more underground contexts.
Sam: Is there a term for that kind of underground work?
Alex: Sometimes it's called samizdat — the secret copying and sharing of art or literature that the state has banned or simply ignored. It allowed women to circulate their perspectives outside of state-controlled channels, building a kind of parallel cultural record.
Sam: So the "Jugoslovenka" framework is really a way to hold official policy and lived experience in the same frame at once.
Alex: That's the core of it. It allows us to see these women not as passive victims of a contradictory system, but as active participants who found ways to use that system to create space for themselves.
Sam: Are there limits to what this approach can show?
Alex: Tumbas acknowledges that. Focusing on visual culture and performance art captures the voices of women who had some access to the public sphere. It's less equipped to document the experiences of women who didn't produce art or perform publicly — whose lives weren't part of any visible record.
Sam: That's a real constraint. The archive only holds what made it into the archive.
Alex: Exactly. But as a framework for understanding how women navigated socialist structures, it offers a genuinely clear lens. And Tumbas suggests the model could be applied to other post-socialist contexts — places like Vietnam or Cuba — to examine whether similar paradoxes appear there.
Sam: So it's not just a study of one country. It's a method for asking a broader question about what equality actually means when the law says one thing and the culture does another.
Alex: That's the significant takeaway. Even in a state that provides legal rights, the work of achieving real equality often falls to individuals — and in Yugoslavia, many women took that work seriously, making it visible through art, performance, and everyday acts of resistance. Thanks for listening to ResearchPod.