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Gender Difference in the Balkans

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Gender Difference in the Balkans GENDER DIFFERENCE IN THE BALKANS SUZANA MILEVSKA A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Goldsmiths' College - University of London Visual Cultures Department October 2005 Abstract This dissertation deals with the issue of gender difference in the Balkans. In order to evade the many assumptions and presumptions that posit gender difference in the Balkan region as being necessarily subsumed to established orders and regimes of representation, this dissertation focuses on an array of visual materials. This singular material consists of nineteenth and twentieth century photographs, and a series of contemporary art works (objects, installations, videos, etc.) This material draws attention to overlooked images of women (some of them taken by women) that resist the logic and rhetoric of the patriarchal order and emphasises the ambiguous rhetoric of gender difference within the field of representation in visual culture. The aim of this dissertation and of this collated visual material is to challenge and deconstruct the problematic understanding of institutional archives as places dedicated to guarding and preserving the truth of written documents and visual imagery. Instead of focusing on the archive as the repository of truth (e. g. about national identity), I attempt to "perform" an archive of the act of becoming a different gender as a result of a way of acquiring knowledge and making art that is specific to the Balkans. The main argument is that gender difference is the product of a discourse that is not necessarily constituted out of a negative differentiation of the subject. This act of becoming one's gender through difference can stem from other patterns and relationships towards the state and the dominant regimes of representation that infiltrate art and visual culture. The relationship between a conventional understanding of gender difference and a discourse stemming from the acquisition of gender difference is what I call the "becoming of gender difference ... The overarching concept put forward to support this argument is the neither. This concept, explored throughout this dissertation, enables the deconstruction of pre-existing discursive figures of alterity already used in non-western cultures and an up dated discussion of the specificities of gender difference in the Balkans. 1 Table of Contents Abstract Table o/Contents 2 Acknowledgements 4 Introduction 5 I. Chapter one: The neither 38 1.1. A conjunction that disjoints 38 1.2. DifferencelDifferance 47 1.3. Hybrid and representation 51 1.4. Representation and the male dress code in the Ottoman Empire 56 1.5. The neither: "sworn virgins" 59 1.6. Cultural neitherness: the Macedonian case 65 1.7. Mapping in reverse perspective 70 Concluding remarks: Archiving the multiplicity of the neither 73 II. Chapter two: Women warriors, lack and agency 82 11.1. Images of women warriors in the Balkan archives 84 11.2. Nationhood and women warriors 86 11.3. Engendering war 93 11.4. Aggression, negativity and lack 95 11.5. Images of women warriors as agency 101 11.6. Archive as a lack 106 III. Chapter three: Archive of veils/folds/events 119 111.1. Spatialisation ofthe veil 119 111.2. Veil(s)ffruth(s) 121 111.3. Veil(s)fEvent(s) 122 Event 'a': Against the veil 123 111.4. The Balkan subject: Neither Eastern nor Western 125 Event 'b': Performing the veil- site event 132 111.5. Performing the production of a face: flirting or historic shift 133 Event 'c': The return of the veil 137 111.6. The archive as veil/event 139 Event 'd': Naming the bridge 142 2 IV. Chapter four: Becoming-gender-difference 153 IV. I. Unfolding the folder: becoming-face 155 IV.2. Embodiment of different roles and voices 157 IV.3. Becoming-minor 160 IV.4. Becoming-compossible-events 168 IV.5. Becoming-celebrity 173 Conclusion 192 Bibliography 213 List of illustrations 224 Illustrations 228 3 Acknowledgments I would like to thank a number of people for their support, generosity, and friendship during the researching and writing of this thesis. I would particularly like to thank Irit Rogoff, my doctoral supervisor to whom I am immensely grateful for her initial interest in my project at its early stage. Also, I want to thank her for her constant encouragement and guidance in theoretical and methodological issues throughout the development and completion of my thesis. I am greatly indebted also to my other supervisor Jean·Paul Martinon for his patient guidance and encouragement with respect and interest for the content of my thesis. His skilful criticism with rigorous and constructive comments on the text made such an invaluable contribution to my work. In the course towards the completion of my project I became indebted to number of people to whom I also want to express my gratitude for their consistent support that helped me sustain the energy to fulfil my research and writing of this thesis. My greatest gratitude goes to all members of the academic personnel at the Goldsmiths' College who were there for me helping and discussing my project at its different stages of development. To mention all of the professors and tutors who helped me is impossible. However 1 want to mention at least the ones to whom I presented my project during the seminars and from whose comments in the presence of my colleagues students of during the tutorials I benefited the most: Andy Lowe, Norman Bryson, Sally Alexander, Lynn Turner and Gavin Butt. Special thanks go to number of archivists in different archives, libraries and museums in the Balkans who shared with me their insights in the mostly unknown and unpublished material. Finally but certainly not lastly, I am eternally grateful for the unabated support of my family, especially to my husband Saso Stanojkovik for his constant efforts to provide all necessary conditions for my everyday work. Funding for this dissertation was provided by the Overseas Research Students award and by the Ministry of Culture of Macedonia. 4 INTRODUCTION An introduction is always placed at the beginning of a text. However, most commonly, the introduction is conceived after the rest of the text has been written. Once the chapters of a thesis have been formulated (if not even thoroughly written), the researcher pretends that he/she is just about to start writing. The introduction announces the contents that are to be discussed later. Thus, by using the future tense to express intention, the researcher projects into the future something that has already happened. The deferment of the narration results in a certain temporisation ofthe text and puts the writer/narrator in an ambivalent position: the position of someone who already knows. but cannot tell yet. The author of an introduction is expected to be prudent with the information about the issues explored and to distribute it in various portions throughout the text. Writing an introduction is about being economical with writing. It is about "constituting a reserve (Vorrat) " for the future, as with any other inscription.! The ultimate outcome of this procedure is to defer the moment of revelation of the event/text itself. In a similar way, the archive saves and preserves its contents: documents, images, letters, "traces" are saved for future research and distribution. This effort in a way assumes that this "investment" can protect the memory, and ultimately the truth.2 But the archive, being simultaneously an "introduction" into both the past and the future, does not itself have an introduction. At least, it cannot be properly announced with one single introduction because there is no one single arche to the archive (its true beginning). There can be no single threshold, neither temporal nor spatial, from which one can enter and start one's own research. When entering an archive, one cannot hope for one relevant introduction, an entry/point (meaning also record). One has to deal with multiple and erratic beginnings, in a temporal or spatial way. On the one hand, even an organised and vigilant researcher who has made all sorts of necessary preparations may overlook an important piece of evidence because of the vastness, and idiosyncratic order, of the archive. Therefore, the desired event, the encounter between the researcher and the sought document/image, might never occur. On the other hand, an important event may take place unexpectedly; an image or document may appear by accident. The multiple entrances to the archive make contingent the event of its entering. 5 Moreover, an archive is a labyrinth with many dead ends and no short cut exits that confuses and seduces at the same time. *** Before I proceed with the presentation of the four entries/points to this dissertation, I want to give a quick overview of the locations and research processes, the visual material found in the process of the research, and the methods of selection. a) Research spaces and processes The research that preceded my dissertation resembled a site-specific curatorial project that looked into issues of gender difference and of its representation in the cultural context of the Balkans. The archival spaces that enabled this project are the historic, national, state, museum, or library archives in Belgrade, Bucharest, Sofia, Zagreb, Skopje, and Bitola; several historic or contemporary exhibitions; some private collections; antique shops and the flea markets in Bucharest, Belgrade and Sofia, as well as the homes and studios of several contemporary artists.3 My research file started gathering and accommodating images and details about many protagonists, events and places. While selecting and gathering the archive, I employed different criteria from the historically determined ones. Finally, for the presentation of the research, there was no other, more adequate archival, museum or gallery space but the space of the research folder itself. Most of the national archives in the Balkans that I approached allowed me to enter their well-kept premises.
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