ABSTRACT
In this chapter, starting from some principled and theoretical (though not always practical) differences between Yugoslavia and the eastern block countries, i try to reconstruct the socialist nonaligned cultural and political context and legacy that gave way to a new feminist wave from the 1970s on.
I was part of it myself as a young university teacher in Zagreb. The battle for more women’s human rights came from that socialist and anticolonial legacy or is in accordance with them, in an intersectional tradition that didn’t yet have that name in the socialist period. The partition of the country that occurred over ten years of war, gave a new motivation to the feminist movement, in that women had to continue crossing borders closed to men. They engaged in the struggle against toxic nationalisms, and dealt for more than ten years with inner war-refugees and deported populations, before engaging with the migrants coming from the global south and heading to the EU. They had to do this as post-yugoslav countries fell for nationalisms, populisms and worse. I then give a rapid sketch of the necessary epistemological approach in such conditions, as well as a brief contour of the fasciospheres. Women’s work with migrants, giving them hospitality and some relief, draws also from their tradition of care in unrecognised reproductive work.
