ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I situate women politicians within their ethnies/nations/states, hence presenting the ways they politicised their personal stories and tragedies as the collective ethnie’s ones. I explain the contributions of four different women politicians from Serbian, Bosniak, and Albanian community collected during my fieldwork in Serbia and Kosovo/a, demonstrating that women politicians contribute to the maintenance of the “core doctrine of nationalism” (Smith, 1991, p. 74). Women politicians recognized the power of, and their loyalty to, the nation; they emphasised its individuality, uniqueness, history, and destiny as they identified with their ethnie/nation and actively worked towards its reproduction. Their experiences and memories became part of collective memories and experiences, and in some cases, the sources for women’s personal drives to become involved in politics. In this chapter I conclude that because of the vulnerability and constant “endangerment” of the ethnie, women politicians were more likely to seek political change through collective action for their ethnies, rather than for women. The inclusion of women’s stories into ethnie ones, however, depended on their congruency with nationalist projects. They became part of the collective narrative only if they fed into the concept of the “uniqueness” and struggles of the nation.
