ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Deconstructing Yugoslav Women’s Recollections of Reproductive Regulation: Oral History, Memory, and Method

• In Event: Listening Otherwise: Epistemic Justice and Methods of Research Participation in Histories of Reproductive Biomedicine

English Abstract

Yugoslav women’s recollections of contraception and abortion, and encounters with the medical system reveal profound tensions between dominant narratives of socialist gender equality and the intimate realities of reproductive decision-making. Through testimonies that move between clinical experiences, everyday pragmatism, and expressions of nostalgia, interviewees navigate what Alexei Yurchak terms an “internal paradox”: the coexistence of pride in a system that promised women “everything,” and memories of coercion, fear, shame, and constrained agency.

I reflect on the intersubjective dynamics that shape these narratives, namely how shared cultural background, generational distance, and political leanings influenced what women chose to reveal, defend, or withhold. Their stories demonstrate how personal memory interweaves with collective scripts, how silences form around taboo experiences, and how nostalgia can both illuminate and obscure the past.

By foregrounding the ethics of interviewing about reproductive experiences, including topics which are rarely discussed even within families, this paper argues that oral history offers a powerful method for tracing continuities between the past and the present, while restoring complexity, vulnerability, and agency to women’s historical voices.

Author

• Branka Bogdan, Independent scholar