Women’s Memory in the Balkans: The Alternative Kosovo Myth
Women’s Memory in the Balkans: The Alternative Kosovo Myth

Summary/Abstract: Re-focusing on the myth of Kosovo from the gender point of view led me to the model of tri-partite analysis of the basic narrative on the Kosovo battle: the semiotic analysis of the body in text after Roland Barthes analysis of the blason, applied to the texts of epic songs from the Kosovo cycle, the historic defining of the role of leading women in Serbia around the battle of Kosovo, following Lucette Valensi’s model of ethnic and cultural groups reading the same historic event, and the anthropological reading of women’s oral and ritual traditions, as recorded by Vuk Karadžić. Vuk Karadžić proposed a genre-gender division of oral poetry in the South-Slavic cultural space of the Balkans as early as the beginning of the 19th century, which inspired me to search for continuities in this subversive, anti-war and anti-epic ethics of women’s position on the Kosovo myth. It was possible to trace this women’s position in literary texts up to the end of 20th century, and to relate it to the anti-war position of many Serbian women during the war in Yugoslavia 1991-1996, and against the Serbian nationalism. The model of historic-cultural reception of the Kosovo myth in Serbia and in the Yugoslav circles is proposed as a grid to read-in women’s history.

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