About the event: Impassioned debates about the garments of Muslim women, followed by state interventions into the gender relations, clothing, and identities of Muslim communities, are neither novel nor specific to our time. Initially attempted in the Soviet Union, Turkey and Iran, interventions reached new levels in Communist Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. This research seminar will discuss three different but connected cases: Soviet interventions in Central Asia; Yugoslav policies towards Muslim communities in the 1940s and 50s; and Bulgarian interventions into the lives of Muslim communities after the Second World War.
All these cases differed from each other, and yet they were remarkably similar despite a long time-span. Discourse about ‘enslaved’ Muslim women and women ‘buried’ behind the veil was behind all social interventions. Politicians, scholars, and the Communist Party activists in all these countries have used the same language and often the same means to target the Muslim communities. The results and the ways these communities resisted were, however, quite different.

About the speaker: Ivan Simić is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (EURUS). He earned his PhD at University College London. Prior to joining EURUS, he taught at Goldsmiths, University of London, and had fellowships at Yale University and the University of Calgary. His first book, Soviet Influences on Postwar Yugoslav Gender Policies, will be published with Palgrave later this year.