engleski

Gendered Experiences and Femininities among Women in rural spaces of Slavonia, Croatia

In an attempt to understand the ways gender is socially and culturally constructed in Slavonia, one of the aims in this study was to grasp and give voice to women's (and men's) everyday lives and experiences. In other words, an endeavour to understand women's lives' in their own terms', in an attempt to understand their 'realities', their perceptions, as well as their engagement in these worlds. This thesis, in its reading of femininity (and masculinity) combines the perspectives of Bourdieu (1979 ; 1986 ; 1987 ; 1989) and Butler (1990 ; 1993 ; 1998 ; 1999) that use the same 'conceptual toolkit'. In this study, I argue that women in this study mostly draw on respectable femininity out of a variety of circulating discourses of femininity. Moreover, I argue that respectable femininity is a trap where although women can enjoy some autonomy in their 'confinement' ; they are prevented in many ways from obtaining other forms of capital (economic, cultural, social, and symbolic). Although this thesis primarily deals with the lives, perceptions and practices of women 'on the ground' it is also necessary to provide a socio-cultural context that reflects conditions as they appear at the macro-level. An overview of the contemporary political, socio-cultural contexts in Croatia (as well as historical) and how this has given rise to national gendered experiences and identities is explored in this thesis. Research for this study was conducted in rural villages in the Vukovar-Syrmia County, situated at the very north-east of Croatia. Features of this rural population are elaborated in this thesis. These are related to deagrarisation pressure imposed by the State after WWII, how present-day popular discourses contextualise rural spaces, as well as the topography, climate, migration history, war losses, ethnic composition, traditional life, and infrastructure of this county. The research sample included both women (67) mostly in their 30s and men (14) mostly in their 40s from neighbouring villages in Slavonia. Preliminary research of a quantitative nature in this study included an overall review of all the available statistics on Croatia as well as a questionnaire for prospective participants. Since quantitative methods seek to answer 'why' questions and do not help us to understand the complexities of lived experience, a representation of phenomena in a different way was required. In this study, qualitative methods (interviews, participant observation) are mainly used because one of the research objectives in this thesis is to understand the subjective experiences of participants. On the whole, findings in this study characteristically show that farm/rural women are in close proximity and have a markedly strong orientation towards their immediate family members and kin relations in their post-marital residences. There is an emphasis on attending others' needs rather than their own, maintaining harmonious relationships in the family and 'fitting in'. Characteristically, there is a long-span mutual knowledge of other persons in the community, which in turn creates an overall lack of anonymity in these communities as well as higher levels of informal social control. Cocooned in prevailing patriarchal attitudes and a difficult recession period it is difficult for farm/rural women to resist the social pressures to participate in the activities that dominate the village subsistence economy and culturally define sociality. Namely, there is an enduring dominant belief in rural communities that the 'ideal' woman is a good housewife/mother and subsequently that women's 'proper' place is most appropriately and naturally in the domestic sphere. Not only does this work to make these women more invisible it effectively silences discussions and challenges to the status quo. Evidently, it is difficult for women to be different and traverse boundaries in these rural communities. Any acts of transgression, subversion and resistance are immediately very visible and become a topic of conversation and gossip. As expected, there was a deeper questioning of traditional gender values and practices especially among more educated, more mobile, and less religious women who often had a wider range of interests. Hence, despite the complexities and demands of the traditional housewife/mother role it may be her main, even only source of power because doing 'respectable' femininity is a form of cultural capital that these women aspire to since they only have meagre resources and less access to different forms of capital. Undoubtedly, these women depend on and are bounded by traditional social norms to endlessly repeat to express who they are and what the world is like through their performance in it.

gendered experiences; femininity; rural spaces; qualitative methods

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