ResearchPod Summary
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.
Alex: Welcome to another episode of ResearchPod. Today, we're looking at a study by Jasmina Tumbas titled "I Am Jugoslovenka."
Sam: That's an intriguing title. What does it mean?
Alex: It translates to "the Yugoslav woman." Tumbas uses this figure as a lens for understanding how women in socialist Yugoslavia navigated a very specific, and often contradictory, social environment.
Sam: So the paper is asking how a socialist state could claim to support gender equality while women still found themselves pushed to the margins?
Alex: Exactly. The central puzzle is how Yugoslavia gave women strong legal rights — access to education, to work, to public life — while simultaneously keeping them in a secondary position within the male-dominated worlds of art and politics.
Sam: That sounds like a difficult tension to sustain. How did the state manage both at the same time?
Alex: Think of it like a double-exposure photograph. One layer is the official state promise of equality. The second layer is the reality of a culture where men still held most of the power. The "Jugoslovenka" is what you see when both layers are visible at once — the gap between the promise and the lived experience.
Sam: So she's not just a historical figure. She's a framework for reading that gap.
Alex: Precisely. And what Tumbas is interested in is how women used the rights the state gave them to push back against the parts of the culture that still treated them as secondary.
Sam: How did they actually do that? Through protests?
Alex: Often through performance art and cultural production. They used their own bodies and their own work to make the contradiction visible — to point directly at the space between what the state promised and how things actually functioned.
Sam: Why was this specific to Yugoslavia, though? Couldn't this have happened anywhere?
Alex: Yugoslavia was unusual because it was the most westward-leaning socialist country during the Cold War. That position created a kind of breathing room where artists could experiment in ways that were considerably harder elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc.
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Sam: You mentioned earlier the idea of "patriarchal socialism." What does that actually describe?
Alex: It describes a system where the government promotes equality in law and in employment, but the actual leadership remains, in practice, a closed circle of men. The state says everyone is equal. The culture still favors men. Those two things coexist, and the tension between them is exactly where these women were working.
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.