POR UMA ARQUEGENEALOGIA DE MILUNKA SAVIĆ: Mulher-homem sérvia na Primeira Guerra Mundial

Abstract

The central theme of this dissertation is the exceptional participation of a Serbian woman, Milunka Savić, in the First World War. We look at this dual subject, a woman-man, through the lense of so called Foucault´s Discourse Analysis, by investigating the role of mediatic, religious and political discourse, among others, in the constitution of truth and subjectivity effects about Milunka, which, depending on different socio-historical conditions, leave her to oblivion or rescue her from it, transforming her into a heroine. This dissertation is based on the premise that language, verbal or imagetic, it being a materialization ground for discourses and being immersed in normalizing power relations, produces and reproduces subjectivity effects. In order to examine movements of truth effects about Milunka, we selected four materialities constitutive of our corpus: (i) a Serbian book Women from Thessaloniki speak, which vocalizes the experience of nine women who participated in wars that took place I Serbia, between 1912 and 1918. Ecoing Serbian patriarchal reality at the beginning of the XX century, the enunciations found in the book restore truths about women’s body, the utility of which was pointed to the well-being of the family and the men. Thus, these enunciations produce the ‘effect woman’ who is submissive and obedient;; (ii) an iconografy of Milunka, composed of images that presently circulate in national online newspapers and whose elements indicate processes of subjectification of Milunka as a woman and a mother, in the one hand, and as a (fe)male worrior, on the other; (iii) two pronouncements given by the president and the patriarch of Serbia, in 2013, at the ritualized ceremony of Milunka’s second burial, when her remains were relocated to the Alley of the Greats in a cemetery in Belgrade, the capital. From an archeological-genealogical viewpoint, the materiality of the pronunciations itself and the factors that conditioned its production – the ritual, the ambiance and the subjects who spoke – reveal the process of heroinization of Milunka, now a great woman and, finally, (iv) the cover of another Serbian book, Woman worrior: Milunka Savić, published in 2014, the back of which shows the enunciation Serbian Joan of Arc, among others, showing, interdiscursively, the meeting point of the two heroines, because both were women warriors. It can be concluded that, even though the enunciations that constitute our subject are related to the field of memory about women inferiority, Milunka being recognized as a heroine today, occupies the subject position as important as that of illustrious men.