Abstract
Towards the end of her pioneering account of the Croatian “lesbian scene” published in 2001, Sanja Sagasta (2001, p. 370) laments that “the [women’s human rights] groups that keep their doors open for lesbian activists are those situated in Zagreb, while feminist principles of supporting all women regardless of their age, nationality, sexual orientation, etc. remain a myth for many NGO activists in the provinces”. This statement would have stayed Sagasta’s conclusion had she not, immediately prior to sending her essay to print, received a piece of news that made her add a new section to it: namely, in October 2000 a group of lesbian women gathered in Rijeka, around 200 km away from the capital, to establish LORI, the first legally registered lesbian (and, more generally, GBT) activist organisation in Croatia. LORI’s unexpected appearance marked lesbian activism’s departure from the centre of Croatian political and social life. This act constituted a counterpoint to the metro-normative “gay imaginary” (Weston 1995), which has “traditionally” portrayed provincial and rural places as intolerant and suffocating, celebrating at the same time urban milieus—namely capital cities—as accepting and progressive.
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Notes
- 1.
The acronym of the organisation NLO is also a play of words: in Serbo-Croatian NLO stands for unidentified flying object (UFO). With this in mind, Maja Pan (2018, p. 210), a feminist lesbian activist from Slovenia who attended many NLO events, stated: “Creation of new spaces, temporalities, imaginations. That is what NLO was already from its foundation and through the act of its foundation: more than a reflection of social oppression and erasure, already with its name it symbolically tried to achieve that unknown and distant, but also internal, that about which we can fantasise, what we can hope for – somewhere in the vicinity of the Earth; that is the space in which we live, but not completely because we were banished from it or we ourselves decided to leave it”.
- 2.
As was the case with some other feminist lesbian endeavours in the Yugoslav space, especially those in Macedonia or Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lepa Mlađenović (see the chapter Speaking separately) also helped with the initial NLO meeting. The fact that both Labris, that organised meetings in Sombor and Novi Sad, as well as Lepa Mlađenović, are based in Belgrade, shows that certain feminist organisations and activists are, in principle, more aware of the need to de-centralise activist engagement.
- 3.
Commenting upon the gap between the externally funded “projects” and concrete activist actions, Biljana Stanković states: “we are working in mud, if we want to be in the streets, if we 90 per cent have guerrilla actions, [we] lie to donors that we are doing advocacy and blah blah blah, we [are] still providing psychological support to lesbians in their transition to coming out and being out” (Calem colloquium 2012, online).
- 4.
For example, given that Hungarian is one of Vojvodina’s official languages, NLO’s logo also had a Hungarian version of the organisation’s name serving as an invitation for Hungarian-speaking lesbian women to join them. Over the years, NLO supported activist mobilisation of Vojvodina’s Romani women, especially the group Rromnjako Ilo from Zrenjanin, which has been, since 2007, dedicated to empowering multi-marginalised/lesbian Romani women to open up dialogue on gender and sexuality in their communities.
- 5.
Čarna Ćosić (1974–2006) was a poet, performer, and feminist lesbian activist from Novi Sad.
- 6.
Given that they were particularly concerned about safety in the early stages of work, the activists adopted the strategy of informing the media only after their activities had taken place.
- 7.
Summarising their approach to working with lesbian women who came to the ghetto, Biljana Stanković stated: “[Our principle is] say what you want even if your voice is shivering… […and] look at me as (if) you never saw a woman before. Why? Because if men are looking at a woman like me in Serbia… what the hell… I cannot be me… so, we ask lesbians, we let lesbians, we want lesbians to feel free as women… to look at women without shame of loving them… we want to rip off their shame” (Calem colloquium 2012, online).
- 8.
“We never liked the word ‘users’. But that is how donors called them in their applications. By not accepting that word, we did not want to be in a position of superiority towards them […] and we were making an effort to involve as many women as possible in our programmes and to encourage them to think about what they could do” (NLO 2015, online).
- 9.
Biljana Stanković was performing in two feminist theatre companies: FENS theatre from Novi Sad and ACT women from Belgrade.
- 10.
For example, Boris Milićević, Lazar Pavlović and his Gay-Straight Alliance (Gej strej alijansa).
- 11.
In the words of Biljana Stanković (Calem colloquium 2012, online): “we decided to go through mud, to be in the street, not to go many high levels further as some gay men and only gay organisations can do, showing in such a way a wrong picture of the context we are living in… being highly mainstreamed and very good friends with politicians […when] you can feel [that] the war [is still] in the air”.
- 12.
BH published a reaction to this decision (CK13 n.d.).
- 13.
The NLO founder Biljana Stanković has, in the meantime, emigrated to Finland, where she is associated with the performance collective Able Art Group (Anđelovski 2018).
- 14.
One striking illustration of this is a twitter exchange that Vesna Pešić, a Serbian sociologist, politician, and one of the leaders of the movement against Slobodan Milošević had with the journalist Daško Milinović who does not live in Belgrade. Irritated by Milinović’s opinion on the reconstruction of Belgrade streets, Pešić said: “You don’t live in Belgrade, why should we waste energy on provincial mentality” (Espresso 2019, online).
- 15.
Intense post-Second World War urbanisation of what used to be distinctly agrarian societies that made up Yugoslavia (Bilić and Stubbs 2015) and later war-related (1990s) population movements were both perceived (also) as villagers’ “invasions” of urban space and culture.
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Bilić, B. (2020). Away from the Capitals: Decentralising Lesbian Activist Engagement. In: Trauma, Violence, and Lesbian Agency in Croatia and Serbia . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22960-3_4
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