Abstract

In the wake of the global reach of #MeToo, in 2021, several dramatic arts students from Serbia publicly spoke about their personal experiences as victims of sexual abuse. Their statements led to the rise of a new activist movement in the post-Yugoslav Balkan countries, named Nisam Tražila [I didn’t ask for it]. After the appearance of Nisam Tražila, an already-existing movement about gender-based discrimination known as Sega Kažuvam [Now I Speak] was revived in North Macedonia. These movements haven’t only created solid grounds for speaking about gender-based discrimination and sexual abuse; they also served as a creative incentive. In Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia, this dissertation aims to address the following research question: How does activism in Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia affect the gender dynamics within the theatre, both off-stage and on-stage? An additional research question is: How do contemporary intertextual dramatic texts portray and deconstruct dominant gender identity narratives and power-dynamics in post-socialist North Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina? Through an intra-regional paired comparison that aims to discover how in reality, gender identity is perceived both within the performance space and the institutional structures, the research focuses on examining these two Balkan countries as most comparable cases of multi-ethnic societies with substantial similarities in their democratic development, considering that they have been through akin periods of political transition and destitution.

Supervisor: Renate Hansen-Kokoruš,  Institute of Slavic Studies 

Co-supervisor: Florian Bieber, Center for Southeast European Studies