Discourse on Corporeality and the Logic of Control in the Works of Contemporary post-Yugoslav Women Playwrights

Abstract

The issue of corporeality is one of the dominant motifs in contemporary women’s playwriting in the countries formed after the collapse of Yugoslavia. At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries women’s bodies function as a specific open register in their works, where real-life content is included. The body is also an instrument which detects the meanings of social actions and interactions. According to the authors – mainly from Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro – the body becomes a constantly-transforming palimpsestic, multi-layered body-text which delivers information about the logic of control. The body-centric perspective here is connected with the problematization of the characters’ reactions to some mechanisms of normalization, classification, and increasing productivity of the bodies in their population. The changes in the configuration of control modes and everyday practices in some areas of women’s life activity are presented. The female authors, e.g.: Milena Bogavac, Maja Pelević (Serbia), Lada Kaštelan, Ivana Sajko (Croatia), Jasna Šamić, Elma Tataragić (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Nataša Nelević (Montenegro), Simona Semenič (Slovenia) illustrate some rituals and transgressions concerning procreation, female visual representations and the body losing its fitness and becoming isolated. In their artistic descriptions the authors confirm the relationship between the cultural and psychological inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text.