The Muslim Woman and Contemporary Feminist Meaning-Making in the Post-Yugoslav Space: Can AFŽ’s “Veil Lifting“ Campaign be Understood as Wholly Emancipatory?

Local contemporary academic feminist historical accounts of the Women’s Antifascist Front (AFŽ) develing campaign in socialist Yugoslavia overwhelmingly applaud it, understanding it as yet another instance of emancipatory politics and policies championed and defended by the organization. Few accounts problematize the campaign (and later legal ban) and contextualize it in terms of the socialist state’s Orientalist motivations, exclusion of considerations of the bodily autonomy and preferences of those traditional and/or religious Muslim women who wished to continue with such veiling practices. We ask, how do these historical accounts of the AFŽ campaign today appear in contemporary feminist meaning-making at the post-Yugoslav semi-periphery? We conclude that such uncritical contemporary recounting of socialist state Orientalist motivations and a predominant lack of critical feminist grappling with state-ordained undressing of women works to reproduce Orientalist frames of Muslim women as “oppressed”, “backward” and “lacking in agency”. In other words, we show how hasty and superficial feminist remembrance bundling the "veil lifting“ campaign in with other AFŽ triumphs works to normalize the Orientalist readings as well as the idea that the modern secular state-sanctioned ban on (Muslim) women’s dress is by default an emancipatory and acceptable feminist practice.