Talking Back to November 1989: Analysing Historical Narratives from the Gender Perspective

Talking Back to November 1989: Analysing Historical Narratives from the Gender Perspective Abstract: Every autumn, monolithic narratives of November 1989 emerge in the media in Slovakia. On the one hand, these narratives tend to reproduce the image of the revolution as a man-made historical event; on the other hand, they raise questions about agency, the space of politics, and the way historical memory has been constructed. The article provides a dialogue between the media narratives of the Velvet Revolution and the narratives of 16 women who were interviewed in a study. The narrative analysis is embedded in research on the feminist social movement and the theory of everyday resistance. The article challenges the idea of the public square as the primary space of the revolution and the ‘tribunes’ as the main actors of November 1989. The title is a reference to Deborah Cohen and Lessie Jo Frazier’s study Talking Back to ‘68. Gendered Narratives, Participatory Spaces, and Political Cultures analysing narratives of 1968 in Mexico. Their research provides a broader context for an interpretation of the narratives of November 1989, revealing the similarities and specific features of the two different events.