‘Our Girl’ Ideology and Start’s ‘Sexual Swashbucklers’: Women and War in the Only Yugoslav Men’s Magazine (1969–1980)

The Croatian magazine Start, “a misbehaved child of the sexual revolution of the sixties”2 was created in 1969. Its visual identity has been marked by nude women throughout its existence. The magazine’s editorial board sometimes presented it as ideological opposition to socialist puritanism, especially exemplified in so-called ‘our girl’ ideology and, therefore, as contributed to women’s emancipation. In order to explore how (some) Yugoslav men reacted to and repackaged the socialist gender agendas, this paper will examine the magazine’s contents through a gendered lens. It will particularly focus on their approach to the imagery of the People’s Liberation Struggle. It will examine a number of articles dealing with the Yugoslav theatre of the Second World War and women’s participation in it. By taking into account textual contributions as well as their visual representations, this paper will study how Western influences participated in the portrayal of the women’s emancipation project, as well as the Yugoslav gender order, during the 1970s. It will highlight how it validated the journalists’ adherence to tradition-bound gender hierarchies, which they mapped onto their supposedly liberal discourse of sexual liberation.