The "re-appearing of the feminine": Kosovo's theatres of war memories after Yugoslavia

This paper focuses on theatre and film in post-war Kosovo, in particular on how these artistic productions have presented, evoked, and elaborated memories of the war, largely by alluding to the most tragic experiences of the conflict and opening a critical renegotiation of the national culture: in contrast to the "disappearing acts" (Taylor, 1997), real or metaphorical, but all gendered, practiced by the conflict throughout the 1990s, they produced what we call the "re-appearing of the feminine". Post-war Kosovo theatre and film are bringing to light memories that "tangles" (Sturken, 1997) with the heroic official memory (Di Lellio and Schwandner-Sievers, 2006), which erased the suffering of civilians as a feminised effect. Even more radically, they are adding previously unheard voices that address the memories of the war to question the gender role their world cosmos has assigned to them. We take the theatre and film as a "multitiered theatre" of war memories, to which the artists and the audiences bring their own histories and memories (Winter, 2006), but for this paper we focus on the works and their authors.