“Unveiling Dreams of Europe: Performance of Europeanness in Feminist Activism in 1990s Kosovo”

European Studies has produced apt literature on performing Europeanness and everyday practices of Europeanisation outside the bounds of the EU. The Western Balkans, situated outdoors of the EU but within Europe has, however, received limited scholarly attention on tracing these Europeanisation processes as historical practices beyond EU enlargement aspirations. Furthermore, women-led and feminist contributions to state-building practices have also been subject to collective academic and societal amnesia. This paper intends to bridge these gaps by focusing on a particular case of historical Europeanization practices, namely feminist activism during Kosovo’s 1990s resistance movement. It investigates how ‘Dreams of Europe’ and attempts of performing ‘Europeanisation’ impacted the feminist activists’ quest for dual liberation: national and feminist. Through the utilization of the intersectionality framework, the paper discusses the influence of the European gaze on strategies of feminist activism, agency in parallel state-building processes, and feminist solidarities during the 1990s. It relies on content and discourse analysis of fieldwork in-depth interviews with prominent activists in Kosovo during the 1990s and narrative interviews of the Oral History Kosovo electronic archive. The paper argues that performing Europeanness was a conscious objective of feminist activism to legitimize their claims in parallel state-building practices and diminished collaboration with feminist activists within Yugoslavia.