ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I borrow the second and third form of women’s participation in nationalist project coined by Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1989, p. 7). I present the ways women politicians from Serbia and Kosovo/a use different political, ideological, and symbolic boundaries and women’s roles as transmitters of culture to promote women’s invaluable contribution to their ethnies/nations. I demonstrate that women politicians often promote the boundaries of their ethnies by reproducing the traditional characteristics of an archetypical woman, adding their own personal positions into the story, and thus creating an image of a “real woman of the nation”. In the examples of archetypical Serbian Kosovo Maiden, Albanian woman activist and educator for national liberation and Bosniak chaste family woman, I conclude that, by using gender traits and roles to achieve their political objectives, women politicians reaffirm rigid gender, political, ideological, and symbolic boundaries of their ethnies/nations. In most cases, the common political strategy for reclaiming power in public discourse was to conform to gender and ethnie essentialisms. However, promotion of traditional gender roles turns against women, when they cross the familiar forms of participation in ethnie and nationalist projects.
