Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black

Drawing on a range of philosophical, anthropological and political theories, the author offers a new way of thinking about agonistic performativity with its critical connections to national and gender politics and alongside the political intricacies of affectivity, courage and justice. Through an ethnographic account of the urban feminist and antinationalist Women in Black of Belgrade movement during the Yugoslav wars she shows that we might understand their dissident politics of mourning as a means to refigure political life beyond sovereign accounts of subjectivity and agency.