Tuesday, June 25, 2013
5.55 (PC Hoofthuis)
The citizens of post-Yugoslav states bear significant marks of at least three recent citizenship regimes. Changes that brought them about were deep and radical, but not absolute, and there are still many overlappings between them. One life only can be seen as an illustration of multiple citizenship transformations. If citizens are also seen as gendered, the conjunctions or intersections of citizenship regimes and gender regimes ought to be taken into account. If socialist citizenship regime produced gendered regimes which insisted on “comradeship” – formally treating men and women as equal not as gendered beings but as comrades – nation-building citizenship regime figured man and women as fundamentally gendered, even markedly sexed beings. During the last decade, the so-called period of transition, the idea of citizenship began to approximate the liberal-democratic model, often represented as Western European model. What changed in the meantime were not only the borders of former Yugoslavia, but also citizenship regimes of the many states that evolved out of it. If citizenship is regarded as dynamic, social and gendered, how should one define the gender regimes actualized by the newest citizenship regime change? This paper seeks to understand what is the connection between the socialist non-gendered model, the distinctively gendered model of nation-building processes, and the “neutral”, neoliberal model in present gendered lives of citizens of post-Yugoslav states.
