Feminism and women’s rights in Kosovo – Intersectionality

By Goda Skiotytė

On the last Wednesday in June, my group and I finished recording our final project for this class. It was a long, 3-hour-long session with 4 different zoom calls, each ending after 40 minutes. But we did it. It felt so good, so rewarding. We managed to put two weeks of brainstorming, asking questions, communicating, planning and organizing into a 25-minute-long, edited audio recording – our podcast about feminism and women’s rights in Kosovo.

First, when we came up with this topic, we were concerned with its broadness. Feminism. Women’s rights. There is so much to talk about. That was, indeed, one of our biggest challenges, but, at the same time, it provided us with much needed freedom at the beginning of the virtual trip to Kosovo. At that point, we had little idea about what was ahead of us and what we would learn.

After the two weeks of meetings and gathering information, we ended up with this huge amount of factual and historical information, personal stories, challenges and struggles. We aimed for the podcast to not be too long, so we organized the information into three big topics, each with a few smaller subtopics. This process was very productive, helped us to organize everything in our heads and led to some good insights. For example, feminism being approached as a peacebuilding tool or the importance of intersectionality. The latter made me think about myself more, about my own intersectional identities. How do I live in this world as a white, Eastern European, queer woman, who is also an immigrant here in the Netherlands? And these are only a few of many aspects of my identity.

In Kosovo, intersectionality is an important term, that I think, does not receive much attention. When talking about women’s rights there, one cannot deny that Kosovar society is still patriarchal and masculinist to a great extent. However, with ethnic tensions being high and some groups being highly marginalized, the intersecting identities make the situation even more complicated. Being an Albanian woman, and being a Roma, Ashkali or Egyptian woman are very distinct experiences. And on top of everything, feminists are still usually seen as de facto lesbian as well, so we have sexual orientation playing a role too. Identity politics are deeply engrained in people’s minds.

Not going too much into detail about what more we talked about in the podcast (you can listen to it yourself!), I wanted to finish up this post by saying that I am very grateful to our teacher, Dr. Anne de Graaf, Nini Pieters and all the people and ex-Peace-labbers who helped her, and, mostly to Kosovo for letting us in, talking with us, teaching us and helping us grow and experience this country at least for a few weeks. I have been very sad and frustrated with not being able to go there myself and doing everything online (how long does it take until you get tired of looking at yourself in a screen, right?), but they made this month the best one possible. We made it, as best as possible.