Chiara Bonfiglioli

The study conducted during the EURIAS fellowship proposes a gendered history of labour, industrialisation and deindustrialisation in the post-Yugoslav region. The book will focus on the case study of the garment industry, exploring the under-researched theme of women’s working lives under socialism and post-socialism, from 1945 until the present days.

Scholarly discussions on the violent break-up of Yugoslavia have tended to focus on the political and economic aspects of war and transition, as well as on the re-drawing of nation-states and ethnic constituencies, overshadowing the social impact of these transformations on ordinary citizens. The proposed study will argue that the issue of women’s labour can serve as a prism to understand the complexity of social history and social citizenship in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav citizenship regimes.

The traditionally feminised garment industry thrived during Yugoslav times: In the 1970s and 1980s, the sector covered approximately 12% of total manufacturing and Yugoslavia was among the leading producers of garments worldwide. After the break-up of Yugoslavia, however, processes of privatisation and deindustrialisation deeply affected the textile sector, leading to factory closures, precarious work and unemployment. Many women who had accessed the labour market during socialism lost their job, and this process contributed to the re-traditionalisation of gender relations brought by nationalist discourses and ethnic war. The case of the garment industry, therefore, can serve as a vantage point for a diachronic study of industrialisation, deindustrialisation and post-socialist transition, assessing the common legacy of the state socialist industrial heritage in post-Yugoslav states, as well as the similar yet differentiated process of industrial ruination which occurred in the last twenty years.

The book will be based on different case studies of textile factories in five Yugoslav republics, now post-Yugoslav successor states: Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia (Montenegro and Kosovo are not included since they did not present a sizeable textile industry). Bringing gender history, transnational social history and post-socialist studies into dialogue, it will combine a variety of sources: official reports, policy-making documents, factory newspapers, fashion magazines and oral history interviews with former and current workers and management staff in the garment industry.