Postmodern Antigones: Women in Black and the Performance of Involuntary Memory

The author analyzes how one non-governmental, anti-war organization in Serbia, Women in Black (Žene u crnom) -- a branch of an international feminist and anti-militarist organization -- remembers and commemorates every year the execution of 8,372 Muslim civilians, in a Bosnian town, Srebrenica that took place in July of 1995. The text is departing from an assumption that the act of remembering does not always depend on a stable system of place, but it can also depend on the bodies, and to concentrate on bodily (or incorporated) practices means to question a dominant idea that only written words, or tangible monuments, may be taken as a metaphor for remembering. Therefore, live performances of Women in Black, here and now, with their subversive aesthetics, are seen as a potential threat. Their performances are also turning them into a kind of contemporary Antigones, or anomalous female historians. To be a female historian is not merely to write about the past, it also means binding oneself to the dead, to tell the truth about the suffering of the Other, who is absent, or dead, and cannot speak for himself.