Gender Difference in the Balkans: Archives of Representations of Gender Difference and Agency in Visual Culture and Contemporary Art in the Balkans

The issue of representation of gender difference in visual culture and art in the Balkans is the main concern of this book. Its central claim is that gender difference needs a discourse that would examine the affirmative ways and processes of constructing new subjectivities rather than mere subjection and oppression. While the prevailing constructionist assumptions posit the subject as always already subsumed to a pre-established symbolic order, in her research Suzana Milevska focuses on visual materials that allow for alternative readings of the hegemonic regimes of representation. The book is imagined as a unique archive that is informed by the overlooked images of gender difference and agency from the past, and reinterprets them through contemporary art works conceived as archives of photographs, objects, videos, installations, and performances. The ambiguous rhetoric of this imagery gives way to arguments that deconstruct the prescriptive concept of the archive as a repository dedicated to guarding and preserving identity and truth. Particularly relevant are the examples of representation of female agency that question the assumptions of patriarchy as a fixed homogenous system.