European Journal of Women’s Studies 2016, Vol. 23(4) 335–352 © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1350506816666891 ejw.sagepub.com EJWS Women’s cinema of trauma: Affect, movement, time Dijana Jelača Fordham University, USA Abstract This article analyses several notable examples of what the author calls the post-Yugoslav women’s cinema of trauma. These films made by women filmmakers challenge the standard tropes of war, as well as normative approaches to war cinema, by highlighting the intimate affective domain of experience, rather than large-scale narratives and collective emotions. The author focuses on the near-silent short and experimental works of Una Gunjak and Šejla Kamerić (both from Bosnia-Herzegovina), and suggests that they offer insightful formal and narrative ways of rethinking the question of what makes a war film, as well as what constitutes a woman’s experience of war. By arguing for a continued, strategic and locally specific use of the term women’s cinema, the author deploys feminist analytics towards inscribing these filmmakers’ work into the transnational flows of knowledge production about marginalized groups and non- Western geographies. Keywords Affect, Bosnia-Herzegovina, trauma and memory, war, women’s cinema, Yugoslavia Women’s cinema as war cinema: Post-conflict perspectives The concept of women’s cinema has haunted feminist inquiries into film ever since Claire Johnston published her seminal essay ‘Women’s cinema as counter-cinema’ in 1973. In it, she set the stage for lively and passionate debates about what constitutes women’s cinema (and the category of woman to begin with), and to what political ends such a term could or should be deployed. Importantly, Johnston’s influential essay concerns itself not with a presumption of women’s cinema as a given fact, but with ‘developing a strategy Corresponding author: Dijana Jelača, Fordham University, Department of Communication and Media Studies, Faculty Memorial Hall 430, Bronx, NY 10458, USA. Email: ddj514@gmail.com 666891EJW 0 0 10.1177/1350506816666891European Journal of Women’s StudiesJelaa research-article 2016 Article by guest on November 21, 2016 ejw.sagepub.com Downloaded from