This book highlights the extent to which women were positioned as historical subjects in the
process of constructing political social and cultural history in Yugoslavia while
simultaneously facing the politics of institutional exclusion and academic ignorance of
progressive ideas and emancipatory struggles. To this effect the book interprets a series of
works written in interwar Yugoslavia by women or about women's position in public space. The
research corpus is varied including LGBT literature autobiographies travelogues literary
correspondence political writings parody bibliographies and dictionaries etc. The book
argues that women have been programmatically made absent from the so-called universal canon of
(post)Yugoslav literature or else negatively valorised or labeled while at the same time
women's writing in interwar Yugoslavia reflected articulated and mapped significant social
political and cultural issues. The book proposes a re-reading of the once censored and
forgotten texts to counter the politics of exclusion that operates even today in the
post-Yugoslav space. This re-reading is carried out in the light of contemporary feminist
theories and aims to reveal and emphasise the emancipatory importance of women's authorship. In
this way Jelena Petrovic provides a fresh perspective on the topical issue of the still
contested (post)Yugoslav space.
