As part of the programme accompanying the exhibition “Perceptions: The Beauty of a Flower is in the Picking”, Prof. Danijela Majstorović, Ph.D., gave a lecture on the topic “Women’s emancipation between continuity and incident”, offering a chronology of media representations of women in the former Yugoslavia since 1941 to date.

The lecture is based on several extensive research projects delving into the periods 1941-1945, the 1960s, 2005, and 2015 to date. While the time of World War II introduced to both magazines and social perception the spirit of combativeness, equality, women’s human rights, internationalization, anti-fascism, parity and fellowship, the spirit of the 1960s was different – it was a time of overworked women, exhausted from juggling the private and public, their jobs, home and children, but also the time of the appearance of the first commercials for cosmetic products and home appliances. After the 1990s wars came the early 2000s, which revamped patriarchy and tradition, introducing three main models for women, the self-sacrificing woman, celebrity wannabe, and the so-called super-woman, successful at balancing her private and public life, an air castle for most women living in this part of the world.

Danijela Majstorović is a full-time professor at the Faculty of Philology, University of Banja Luka, associated member of the Research Network in Queer Studies, Decolonial Feminisms and Cultural Transformations of Justus Liebig University Giessen, and Humboldt Research Fellow.