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Women in the Socialist Fish-Canning Industry: Insights from the Yugoslav Adriatic Coast

Author

Listed:
  • Kosmos Iva

    (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia)

  • Petrović Tanja

    (Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, Slovenia)

Abstract

This article discusses the implications of including women in the labor force of the fish-canning factories on the Adriatic coast in socialist Yugoslavia. The discussion is based on ethnographic interviews with former workers from the Plavica (Cres), Kvarner (Lošinj), and Sirena (Lastovo) canneries. The authors offer insights into the socially relevant discursive registers in which this gendered labor is situated. As they reminisced, the interviewees spoke about modernization, mobility, and women’s emancipation as the dominant tropes of socialist industrialization, but also about perceptions based on strictly defined gender roles, insider-outsider dynamics, and local logics of social differentiation. The authors contextualize these workers’ narratives and experiences in discourses on industrial labor and fish canning on the global scale. They observe how workers’ memories and experiences in the Yugoslav socialist context contrast with the widespread perception of factory work as mundane and meaningless.

Suggested Citation

  • Kosmos Iva & Petrović Tanja, 2025. "Women in the Socialist Fish-Canning Industry: Insights from the Yugoslav Adriatic Coast," Comparative Southeast European Studies, De Gruyter, vol. 73(2), pages 181-208.
  • Handle: RePEc:bpj:soeuro:v:73:y:2025:i:2:p:181-208:n:1002
    DOI: 10.1515/soeu-2024-0063
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