Seeking Independence: Making Nation, Memory, and Manhood in Kosova.

Abstract

This dissertation examines how national and gendered ideologies in state and nation-building projects in the new Balkan state of Kosova have been mobilized and contested since the late 1980s. The dissertation contributes to an understanding of broader concerns with political and social movements in Kosova, and their engagement with cultural change. In particular I trace how manhood and womanhood have figured into the cultural formations of these movements, including customary law, kinship, violence, memory and history. The dissertation is based on uninterrupted ethnographic research conducted between 2004-2006, and ethnographic and archival research that continued until 2011. I draw from a number of historical turning points: international military intervention in 1999, the movement for blood-feud reconciliation in the early 1990s, and post-war politics in art and culture. Through focus on intellectuals, soldiers, politicians, activists, and artists, I show how narratives, performances, and built forms are made cultural resources for enacting and constituting gendered body politics. The first part of the dissertation argues that Kosova is a compelling case through which to understand conflict and post-conflict situations, international protectorates, and the politics of cultural difference that emerge out of such contexts. In the second part I move back in time to the emergence of the large-scale civic resistance campaign of the early1990s. I argue that this movement articulated relatedness between nation and manhood as one based on traditions of endurance. Subsequently, the liberation war mobilized forms of manhood and national solidarity that had to do with fighting back. In this part of the dissertation, I outline the contours of masculinity and manhood in a militarized and post-conflict social landscape. In the final part, I highlight public performances, as well as contemporary and public art. I argue that shifts in political systems empower and disempower constructs of political agency based on gender and aesthetics of power. The main argument of this dissertation is that national and gendered belongings and histories are made through a persistent reframing of traditions, confrontations with power, the spaces in which these traditions appear, conflicts over the legitimacy of state institutions, and the political practices of diverse socio-cultural groups.