"I am Jugoslovenka" argues that queer-feminist artistic and political resistance were paradoxically enabled by socialist Yugoslavia's unique history of patriarchy and women's emancipation. Spanning performance and conceptual art, video works, film and pop music, lesbian activism and press photos of female snipers in the Yugoslav wars, the book analyses feminist resistance in a range of performative actions that manifest the radical embodiment of Yugoslavia's anti-fascist, transnational and feminist legacies. It covers celebrated and lesser-known artists from the 1970s to today, including Marina Abramović, Sanja Iveković, Vlasta Delimar, Tanja Ostojić, Selma Selman and Helena Janečić, along with music legends Lepa Brena and Esma Redžepova. "I am Jugoslovenka" tells a unique story of women's resistance through the intersection of feminism, socialism and nationalism in East European visual culture.
The book will be presented by the author, Jasmina Tumbaš, with Ivana Bago, art historian and theoretician, and Martina Munivrana, chief curator at Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb.
Jasmina Tumbas (PhD, Art History, Duke University) is an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History & Performance Studies and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo. Her first book, “I Am Jugoslovenka!” Feminist Performance Politics During & After Yugoslav Socialism has recently been published by Manchester University Press’ Rethinking Art's Histories series (February 2022). Tumbas is also working on a second manuscript, Feminists of the Yugoslav Diaspora: Art and Resistance Beyond Citizenship and Nationhood. She served as the guest-editor for the special issue of ArtLeaks Gazette #5: Patriarchy Over and Out: Discourse Made Manifest and her research has appeared in ArtMargins, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, Art Monthly, Art in America, ASAP Journal, Art and Documentation, and in the anthologies Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance (edited by Marina Gržinić and Aneta Stojnić) and Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere (edited by Katalin Cseh-Varga and Adam Czirak).
