Description: Cultural production by and about Yugoslav and Carinthian women partisans during WWII: an unparalleled example of engaged art.
Brief description: Elena Messner is an author, scholar, and a senior postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Slavic Studies at Universität Wien, with a project on feminist periodicals from ex-Yugoslavia. She is also a lecturer in Slavic literatures at the Department of Slavic Studies at Universität Klagenfurt. Her research interests include (post-)Yugoslav literature, art and periodicals, feminist theory, translation and reception theory as well as the cultural heritage of the Yugoslav resistance movement.
Review Quotes: »Equality between men and women is not a distant ideal which is to be realized through a longue-durée process of mentality change. Rather, it is the starting point and, at the same time, the very form of the struggle for emancipation. This was perfectly clear to the female partisans and their male comrades fighting fascism. Why have we forgotten it? Can we learn it again? Yes, we can! ‒ tells us this book and offers the first lesson: the cultural and artistic legacy of women fighting with the Yugoslav partisans.«-- "Boris Buden, cultural theorist, Berlin"