International interdisciplinary conference
Do Women Have Victory Day? Women's Traumatic Memory and Resistance Narratives
The Centre for Women's Studies, Zagreb is organising an interdisciplinary conference. Do women have victory day? Women's traumatic memory and resistance narratives€ ¦’´ which will be held on May 8-9, 2009 in Zagreb, Croatia.
The two-day interdisciplinary conference on the topic of women's memory of systematic violence, deportation, persecution, survival and resistance during the Second World War and the aftermath will gather Croatian and European experts from
the fields of history, anthropology, literary criticism, women's and gender studies, political sciences, sociology etc., as well as teachers, artists, activists, publishers and other professionals, who will share their insights and research results in the above mentioned topics.
Contemporary feminist exploration of collective women's memory of the twentieth-century historical divides shows how persistent marginalisation of women's witness voices is interrelated with post-war political reconstitution of patriarchal order and women’s culture of silence about violence. The overshadowing of women’s memories was enhanced by specific types of traumatic experiences (such as sexual abuse, separation from or loss of children and family, damage of women’s health, exclusion
from political participation, feelings of shame and survivor’s guilt etc.) that were not sufficiently recognized in national memory and restitution politics. While women’s efforts in pedagogical, museological or archival articulation of official narrations about war heroism and suffering have been significant, their role in celebrating the European victory day(s) is still ancillary.
The conference aims to address the following topics:
- Traumatic memories, texts and narratives’ theoretical approaches and case-studies
- Narrations of resistance and forgotten war heroines
- Memory regimes after the war national, transnational, and European
- Gender specific aspect of Second World War (Nazi, fascist, Stalinist, and other
totalitarian € ¦’±regimes€ ¦’²) violence, including persecution, slave work, concentration and detention camps, investigation and torture, medical intervention etc.
- Silenced facts and fantasies from female survivors€ ¦’² perspective
- Pedagogical use of women€ ¦’²s testimonies, memoirs and oral histories
The following specific research inquiries are particularly welcomed:
- What are gender particularities in transmitting traumatic experiences?
- Are there women€ ¦’²s heroic narrations of war?
- How did female survivors€ ¦’² narratives shape the political and cultural forms of
collective memory in European societies after the Second World War and after 1989 in particular?
- How did gender specific causes and forms of torture and persecution influence
post-war processes, reformation camps and western anti-communist campaigns, as well as the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia?
- How did the lack of individual compensation influence the suppression and slight
of women€ ¦’²s testimonies on camp experiences?
- How did the exclusion of former female revolutionaries from the political sphere influence socio-economic processes?
- How did the Stalinist camps use torture by confession and trauma reanimation in
case of female Nazi camp survivors?
- Where are situated women€ ¦’²s voices in the canon of testimonial literature, which is dominated by Primo Levi, Jorge Semprun, Elie Wiesel and Imre Kertesz?
The conference is organised in the framework of the project Exploring Memories of Women Victims of Nazism and Undemocratic Regimes in Research and Teaching funded by the EACEA programme Europe for Citizens. The main aim of the project is to
explore the specificities of women survivors€ ¦’² memories of the Second World War mass deportation, persecution and detention practices, and to create a model for their adequate documenting and valorisation, as well as their meaningful and responsible use in the classroom.
We invite both senior and junior researchers from a broad spectrum of academic disciplines and critical studies, as well as teachers, artists, activists, publishers and other professionals interested in participating in the conference to
send us their proposals for panels and papers.
Abstracts of a maximum 300 words and a title, accompanied by a short CV, should be sent to zenstud@zamir. net no later than March 22, 2009. The Programme board
will publish a preliminary programme after considering all applications by March 31.
Limited resources will be available for covering accommodation and travel expenses, however we are strongly encouraging participants to seek alternative sources of funding and/or accommodation. Please indicate in your application whether you need the organizers to cover those expenses.
Contact person: Sandra Prlenda, Centre for Women's Studies, zenstud@zamir. net, +385 1 48 72 406.
Programme committee: Natka Badurina, Anna-Maria Gr€ ¦ünfelder, Biljana Kasic, Renata Jambresic Kirin, Sandra Prlenda and Drago Roksandic.
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