Gendered ethnography of the parliament of Serbia

Ethnographic analysis is aimed to present the Parliament of Serbia as institutional, political, spatial and cultural ambience in which (un)written rules, rituals and regulations are designed to facilitate or inhibit bridging of the gender gap between female and male MPs. This paper explores the different microstrategies of women MPs of their initiation, accommodation, mitigation and challenging of established parliamentary gender binary hierarchical settings and in/ formal rules and norms. At all levels of the analysis, an interpretive dialogue was introduced to present the testimonies of women who served as MPs in the Serbian parliament with the aim to present the comparative genesis of their gender and political emancipation. Ethnographic analysis shows that the main focal points of the power of women MPs in parliamentary hierarchy settings are evaluated as inadequate in comparison to high level of their descriptive representation. Electoral engineering of increasing women quotas results, paradoxically, in greater exposure and vulnerability of women parliamentarians to various gender-related forms of verbal, psychological, sexual harassment and violence. The affirmative model of women?s empowerment is limited by strong gravitation field of loyalty to their political parties.