Women's stories of the Yugoslav breakup: Wartime experiences of deviance

This project investigates how women construct accounts of the Yugoslav breakup as gendered performances, contributing to Balkan criminology and narrative criminology. Their accounts relate to the wartime illicit settings of the black market and smuggling. Based upon fieldwork in Cyprus and Serbia, during which two narrative interviews were conducted, this study explores how women narrate their stories of illegality with the benefit of distance, particularly how they discursively employ gender as situated subjects in and producers of their discourses. The project elevates the time and context-specific nature of the narratives to see how women narrate their stories as women war survivors; actors in illicit settings and in their accounts. It is stated that a narrative approach reveals women’s complexity of their storied experience and their choices - taken within gendered restrictions, but discursively crafted. The project shows the ways women’s stories diversify and externalise discourses of the Yugoslav breakup into broader criminological inquiries relating to women’s criminality; their relation to crime, multiplicity of experience, and broader understandings of criminality. It concludes that women construct their accounts in ways that inform and ‘genderise’ existing discourses, elevating agency in discourses of disadvantage and vulnerability, drawing on women’s conventionality and wartime normative criminality, and re-negotiating situated positions in wartime and post-war discourses. And as such, their accounts become a great source of enriching existing stories, including women’s agency in stories of considerably limited agency within discourses of the Yugoslav conflicts. They constitute part of a broader criminological inquiry relating to incorporating women’s stories to further our understandings of deviance.