Bojan Bilić, “Europe ♥ Gays?: LGBT Activism and Europeanisation in the Post-Yugoslav Space”
Wednesday, 19 November 2014, 20:00-22:00 CET
Universiteitsbibliotheek
Doelenzaal
Singel425
1012 WP
Amsterdam
As the destructive power of nationalism has subsided over the last decade, the status and application of LGBT rights has remained one of the most polarizing political issues in the post-Yugoslav space. This lecture outlines the major trends of post-Yugoslav LGBT activism showing how it developed at the intersection of war, poverty, strong re-clericalisation, pronounced urban-rural tensions, contested sovereignties and European integration processes. Drawing upon my recent ethnographic work in Serbia, I discuss the cultural implications of pairing Europeanisation with “gay struggle” and argue that this coupling destabilises the grassroots ownership of activist initiatives and detaches the increasingly professionalized activist community from its “constituency”. By tracing the developmental trajectory of the Belgrade Pride parade, I point to the challenges that identitarian activist politics based on “non-normative” sexualities encounter in the current social circumstances. I claim that this event is used as a bargaining chip in negotiations regarding Serbia’s “Europeanness” and its potential membership of the European Union.
Bojan Bilić is Marie Curie Fellow at the Centre for Gender and Sexuality, Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam, where he is working on a research project on the history and politics of (post-)Yugoslav LGBT activist organising. Before moving to the Netherlands, Bojan worked as MIREES academic tutor at the University of Bologna and he was Volkswagen Stiftung NewDem Junior Fellow at the Central European University Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest. Bojan holds a PhD in Slavonic and East European Studies from the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He is the author of We Were Gasping for Air: [Post-]Yugoslav Anti-War Activism and Its Legacy (Nomos, 2012) and co-editor (with Vesna Janković) of Resisting the Evil: [Post-]Yugoslav Anti-War Contention (Nomos, 2012).