Gender Difference 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 subjection and oppression. While the prevailing constructionist assumptions posit the subject as always already subsumed to a pre-established symbolic order, this research focuses on visual materials that allow for alternative readings of the hegemonic regimes of representation. The book is imagined as a unique archive that informed by the overlooked images of gender difference from the past 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 visualised female agency that question the consideration of patriarchy as a fixed homogenous system.