STORIES OF EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE FEMALE PORTRAIT GENRE FROM LEFT-WING AVANT-GARDE TO POSTFEMINISM.

Abstract

This paper analyzes the genre-ideological settings which stories of extraordinary women, stories aimed at girls and female young adults, are based on both globally (Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 1 and 2, 20 Extraordinary Girls Who Changed the World) and regionally (Prkosne Srpkinje, Kakva ženska, Žene BiH, Priče o neustrašivim hrvatskim ženama) . The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to analyze the discursive strategies that utilize the ideology of liberal-feminist and / or post-feminist media and movements in the first decades of the 21st century in the text. Those strategies are evident in the selection of exceptional women who enter these anthologies, as well as in representational strategies, the result of which is the erasure of class and political assumptions underlying women’s movements in the 20th century. Secondly, the aim of this paper is to point out how the regional peculiarity of the female portrait genre, its internationalist and pro-Yugoslav character, since it was created in the periodicals of both feminist and communist movement in the interwar period, is transformed in order to adapt to the market and also due to the acceptance of post-feminist ideology as the dominant ideology of contemporary girls’ culture and mass media (Rosalind Gill, 2007). Finally, I will point out what model of women’s history offers a constant balancing between the feminist background of the genre and the semantic layers of postfeminism, which is the ideology of deradicalization of the women’s movement.