ABSTRACT
Kosovo’s national story in the National Museum of Kosovo (NMK), a crucial institution of power in preserving and exhibiting its cultural heritage, unfolds as a masculinised narrative displayed through the barrel of a gun. Its scripts are written primarily “by men, for men, and about men”. In reading the NMK’s exhibition as representation and text for purposes of this research, it was rather obvious that not all genders occupy their part of history as equal participants in Kosovo’s statebuilding process. The heroisms of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and the peaceful resistance of the Democratic League of Kosovo (DLK) are echoed all around the permanent exhibition; whereas, women’s stories are largely excluded and the permanent exhibition does not mention any of the women who were politically active in the 1990s, participated in the KLA during the war and, inexcusably, the exhibition excludes the stories of an estimating 20,000 women who were assaulted and raped during the war. In prioritising this pride and heroic discourse, NMK’s labels and object displays reflect masculine ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity that are rarely “heard in the lexicon of femininity”, but they do, in fact, “speak in the language of nationalism”. Considering these prevalent masculine narratives in the NMK, this chapter problematises the following question: Why does a national museum with an almost exclusively male-centred narrative brand itself around the image of a female deity reflecting the cult of a mother idol?
