ABSTRACT
Women activists’ subjectivities, narratives and contributions to the national resistances and statebuilding processes remain sidelined in public discourse and official historical accounts more than 20 years after the war in Kosova. Drawing on feminist knowledge in Kosova, oral history and memory-work, this chapter examines the life narratives of four Kosovar Albanian women activists, who participated in various types of local, national and regional political and civic activism during the 1980s and 1990s. They were part of campaigns for women’s literacy, national liberation underground groups, civic resistance against Milosevic’s regime, grassroots women’s rights organisations and statebuilding processes. In particular, the chapter traces the ways how, through their life narratives, the women activists construct their subjectivities and positionalities in relation to broader historical events, and ascribe meaning to their activism experiences. Most critically, the chapter suggests that their subversive stories of everyday resistance constitute counter-memories and a feminist epistemic intervention in the post-war, male-dominated political memory in Kosova.
