Universität Wien / University of Vienna
Marietta-Blau-Saal
Universitätsring 1
Stiege 10, Hochparterre
1010 Wien

What epistemological and affective tools are available to feminists who were born and live in any part of what was once Eastern Europe during the Cold War? To describe these tools, Adriana Zaharijević will revisit four main debates within Eastern European feminism in her talk: East/West debate, the debate on post-socialism and postcolonialism, the debate on history, and the recognition/redistribution debate. These debates are set within the broader context of Eastern Europe’s return to and subsequent departure from the West, and the assumptions and the stakes involved are delineated. Adriana Zaharijević’s major claim is that our tools are built on erasures. The talk will argue for a self-conscious post-socialist feminism, for the development of conceptual tools to help us better understand where we stand – and even more importantly, where we want to stand.

The Dubravka Ugrešić Lecture Series is dedicated to the memory of Dubravka Ugrešić, a writer and thinker from former Yugoslavia, who passed away in spring 2023. She was a woman, an intellectual, a writer of special charisma, courage and sense of justice. Her literary work is important not only as art, but also as an example of creative political thinking and social responsibility of the intellectual in the best Arendtian tradition. Through this lecture series, we aim to honour Dubravka and her work by acknowledging scholarship and art by and about women in Eastern and Central Europe.

Adriana Zaharijević is a Principal Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. Her work combines political philosophy, feminist theory and social history. She is the author of four monographs (in Serbian) Becoming a Woman (2010), Who Is an Individual? (2014, 2019), Life of Bodies (2020), and Judith Butler and Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). She published in East European Politics and Societies, Europe- an Journal of Women Studies, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Redescriptions, Signs, Social Politics, and Women’s Studies Inter- national Forum. Her texts have been translated into Albanian, Bulgarian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Slovenian, Turkish and Ukrainian. She has actively translated feminist theory and philosophy into Serbian for two decades. She writes short pieces for a wider public, in which she tackles social inequalities, antinationalism and antimilitarism. Adriana is the 2022 Emma Goldman Snowball awardee.

This lecture is part of the Days of Attention in support of the Serbian student protests. More information is available here.

Partners of the Dubravka Ugrešić Lecture Series: 
Chair of South Slavic Literature and the Key Research Area of Women‘s and Gender History at the University of Vienna, the Vienna office of the Southeast Europe Association (SOG), the Department of Gender Studies and the Yugo-Region Research Group of the Central European University.

Organising committee: 
Elissa Helms (CEU), Miranda Jakiša (University of Vienna), Claudia Kraft (University of Vienna), Jasmina Lukić (CEU), Zsófia Lóránd (University of Vienna)

Event funded by the ERC Project HERESSEE (Department of Contemporary History | RECET – Research Center for the History of Transformations, University of Vienna).