Innocence and Victimhood: Gender, Nation, and Women's Activism in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina

Elissa Helms, Central European University, Budapest

Based on her recently published book, Innocence and Victimhood (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) Elissa Helms will discuss narratives of victimhood in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina which often perpetuate dominant images of women as victims and peacemakers in a conflict and political system led by men.

In a sober corrective to such accounts, she offers a critical look at the politics of women’s activism and gendered nationalism in a postwar and postsocialist society. Innocence and Victimhood demonstrates how women activists responded to, challenged, and often reinforced essentialist images in affirmative ways, utilizing the moral purity associated with the position of victimhood to bolster social claims, shape political visions, pursue foreign funding, and wage campaigns for postwar justice. Deeply sensitive to the suffering at the heart of Bosnian women’s (and men’s) wartime experiences, this book also reveals the limitations to strategies that emphasize innocence and victimhood.

Elissa Helms is a cultural anthropologist, Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Gender Studies at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary