Stepanovic, Natalija

In her book The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia, Zsófia Lóránd notes that feminists of the 1970s and 1980s criticized state socialism because it failed to emancipate women. Their areas of intervention, elaborates Lóránd, included academia, the arts and literature, and popular culture. Even though she wasn’t directly involved in feminist circles, Sunčanja Škrinjarić touched upon many then-relevant issues like female creativity, sexual harassment, and the notion of universal citizenship. Škrinjarić’s radio play The Dark Room (1983) is an amalgam of the accounts on the recently deceased female artist who was living in a small, state-owned apartment. Neighbors’, lovers’, and friends’ voices overlap while trying to describe the recluse artist. My analysis brings together Western feminist theories on female creativity (Woolf, Gilbert and Gubar) and local historiography – some recollections are universally sexist (the unnamed artist was a promiscuous spinster who failed to do chores properly etc.), others are Yugoslavia-specific (as such women, she didn’t deserve the apartment provided by the government). I argue that Yugoslavia promoted a certain image of socialist artist (dignified and male), while dismissing subversive art made by women and embodied by the protagonist of the play. Finally, the artist destroyed all of her works just before she died – I connect this lack of legacy with the chronology of Croatian (post-Yugoslav) feminism: as theatre studies scholar Nataša Govedić wrote in 2000, loss of tradition means that every new generation of women needed to reinvent feminism.

Natalija Iva Stepanović, Central European University, graduated with a master's degree in Comparative Literature at the University of Zagreb in summer 2019 with a thesis about Croatian gay and lesbian prose. She is currently enrolled in a master’s program in Gender Studies at Central European University and working on a thesis about women’s writing in Socialist Yugoslavia. She is a lecturer at Centre for Women's Studies Zagreb, a member of the editorial board of the journal for literature and culture k. and a participant in regional (Southeast European) critical project Resisting Readers. her essays on feminism and popular culture were published on websites Muf and Krilo. She lives in Budapest but consider Belgrade home.  

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