ABSTRACT
National, ethnic, and religious diversity and tensions in the Balkans have long attracted the attention of scholars and policy-makers. Mostly since the Yugoslav Wars, gender challenges and women’s tribulations connected to their experiences during the war have also generated academic investigations and feminist activism. This chapter examines film depictions of Balkan women’s victimization in times of conflicts, from the historical conversion of Balkan Christians (seventeenth century) to Islam, to recent ethnic and religious clashes in Bulgaria during the late 1980s and Bosnia in the 1990s. My analysis of various cinematic products exposes national agendas and argues that, despite differences in historical periods and state configurations, when Christian and Muslim male communities struggle for domination, women have been manipulated or victimized, yet their modes of resistance and survival transgress ethno-national and religious construct and affirm their subjectivity. In the films discussed, women reveal a range of behavior from the abject choice of self-sacrifice, to following their own desires and asserting their willpower, to talking back and voicing their beliefs-all transgressive acts that challenge the established norms of their societies.
