Odrodzić płeć kości: polityka pamięci w Bośni i Hercegowinie
Recovering the Sex of the Bone: The Politics of Memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Summary/Abstract: This article explores legal and ethical empowerment in the context of the unearthed remains of victims of the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. Triangulating the premises of the politics of hope, the politics of memory and bio- and necropolitics with research on gender, Arsenijević analyses forms of cooperation between science (international medical services), bureaucracy (the state’s management of multiculturalism) as well as religion (funerary rites). He also problematizes the dilemmas of identifying human remains. The article poses several difficult questions about the sex and the national and ethnic identity of the individuals whose remains are exhumed, as well as current and past practices of their reification as ethnic victims. Arsenijević considers the perspective of the politics of hope that followed the genocide and in the period of the transformation after 1995. Drawing on literary works by women writers (poetry by Adisa Bašić and Ferida Duraković, prose by Šejla Šehabović), the article shows that in Bosnia and Herzegovina it is women who confront themselves most profoundly with the trauma of the recent past.

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