Abstract
Transnational Gender History: The Case of Unveiling of Muslim Women in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria This paper explores gender policies of the communist governments of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, compares them and situates them in transnational history perspective. In 1951 the Yugoslav Communist Party launched an aggressive veil lifting campaign introducing severe punishment for women and those who by any means pressured them to wear the veil.
The Party's activists entered houses and forced people to appear in public unveiled. The campaign followed a series of interventions into Muslim communities, including mandatory elementary education for girls, a ban on underage marriage, and the replacement of Sharia law with the universal Yugoslav law on marriage.
Similar processes occurred in socialist Bulgaria a decade later. The state engaged in controlling the garment choices of Muslim women, name changing and assimilation programmes.
When they failed to change people's identities and prevent them from speaking Turkish, the communist government of Bulgaria forcefully extradited hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the late 1980s. In this paper, I will explore how gender policies towards Muslim women were utilised to exert influence over Muslim communities for state-building purposes.
Soviet models heavily influenced both countries, and I look at how ideas about Muslim women, modernity, and gender relations were adapted in each case, informing aggressive policies. I will also address how Muslim women and their communities reacted and explore the positioning of the religious authorities.
Finally, I will question the broader consequences of the authoritarian state's attempt to change cultural norms aggressively and to what extent these policies contributed to Islamophobia.