Abstract
After a contentious and often-violent decade, 2015 proved to be an annus mirabilis in Serbian and post-Yugoslav non-heterosexual and trans activist organising. That year not only witnessed a relatively smooth unfolding of the Belgrade Pride Parade but the streets of the Serbian (and former Yugoslav) capital also welcomed, until then unprecedented, Lesbian March and Trans Pride. This surprising diversity testified, on the one hand, to the vital currents of LGBT activist engagement that survived, among other unfavourable circumstances, high levels of both institutionalised and socially widespread homophobia. On closer inspection, though, such an abundance of activist endeavours concentrated in a relatively short period of time pointed to an emotionally charged “underworld” of tensions, frustrations, and challenges that local activists faced in their efforts to advance the (heterogeneous) cause of LGBT emancipation.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
As Maljković (2016, p. 221) asks: “is it not true that the majority of leaders of the activist organisations in the wider region are (gay) men? Labris, a lesbian group from Serbia, and Kontra […], lesbian organisation from Croatia, are exceptions in this regard or should I rather say, they represent a reversal of the same principle that insists on exclusively female membership and does not really problematise sexual dichotomies. This by no means suggests that there is no ‘factual’ discrimination of women or men, but does not this widespread reasoning sometimes sustain the logic of the sexual binary and does it not, at least indirectly, exclude the possibility for ‘intersexuality’ to emerge or for sexuality to be perceived as a scale”.
- 3.
Podmore (2016) analyses two separate lesbian/dyke marches that took place in Montréal, Canada, in the summer of 2012, drawing upon Nancy Fraser’s notion of counterpublic. She shows that performances of lesbian “right to the city” (see also Bilić and Stubbs 2015) tend to be far from the unified ideal present in Fraser’s work, given that lesbian counterpublics are contested, multiple, and divisive.
- 4.
There were 52 posts following the March announcement.
- 5.
Looking back at her life decades later, Lois Anne Addison (2004, online) stated: “I ceased to be a lesbian separatist when partner left me to have an affair with a male attending at Duke. I had a very hard time and it was the staff at work that took care of me. This certainly forced me to re-evaluate my position. They were wonderful years – because my politics and that I was a lesbian were all out in the open”.
- 6.
For example, Cvetkovich (2003, p. 158) argues that “once again lesbians, many of whom came to Act Up with considerable political experience, seem to be some of the first to disappear from Act Up’s history”.
- 7.
Such initiatives would get to be known as “new feminism”, given that they marked the appearance of a new political subject different from the one operating with the institutions of the Yugoslav state (“state feminism”). Nadežda Radović (2013) claims that the representatives of new feminism did not sufficiently acknowledge the way in which it relied upon and continued the progressive currents of women’s mobilisations in the inter-war (Petrović 2018) and (post-)Second World War (Dugandžić and Okić 2016) periods. For example, in April 1919, Croatian and Serbian women founded the Secretariat of Women Socialists (Sekretarijat žena socijalista), which operated within the Socialist Workers’ Party (Socijalistička radnička partija). See also Božinović (1996), Petrović (2018), Sklevicky (1984).
- 8.
However, all Yugoslav women were not equally informed about such legal provisions. Bonfiglioli (2008) shows that, during the conference, the Italian participants talked about abortion with a woman from Kosovo, who told them that abortion was not allowed in Yugoslavia. On hearing this, Žarana Papić (Iveković, as cited in Bonfiglioli 2008, p. 84) one of the organisers, said: “What are you saying? What, it is not allowed? Of course it is allowed”. This exchange points to the fact that Italian activists engaged in abortion struggles were not familiar with legal developments in what used to be their neighbouring country, but it also highlights how patriarchy modulated and effectively inhibited access to progressive state measures. Like a lot of LGBT legislation that would appear decades later in the post-Yugoslav states, the access to what law rendered possible was restricted to mostly urban, middle-class layers. (Most of the 1978 Yugoslav organisers/participants were children of famous partisans or, in one way or the other, related to the (male) representatives of the communist establishment: e.g., Dunja Blažević is the daughter of Jakov Blažević, who was the president of the presidency of the People’s Republic of Croatia between 1974 and 1982; Žarana Papić was the sister of Žarko Papić, a member of the Executive Council of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia; Sonja Drljević was the daughter of Savo Drljević, national hero and the Yugoslav People’s Army official; Borka Pavićević was the daughter of Vuko Pavićević, partisan and professor at the Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy, etc., see Radović 2013.) More than anything, constricting legislation to its formalistic and declarative purposes testifies to its fragility: the abortion provisions were among the first to come under attack in the highly homogenising Serbia and Croatia in the early 1990s, LGBT emancipation in Croatia was curbed by the 2013 Constitutional referendum, and the like.
- 9.
Translations from the French are mine.
- 10.
Neđeljka Neda Božinović-Radosavljević, a prominent member of the Front, would, in the early 1990s, join many initiatives of the feminist anti-war group, Women in Black. Her name also appeared in the razotkvirivanje debate on the Lesbian March as Zorica Mršević (razotkvirivanje, 14 April 2015) reported that Neda Božinović (although not lesbian herself) was instrumental in gathering the documentation necessary for the formal registration of the lesbian group, Labris.
- 11.
Vida Tomšič (1988/1990, online) also addressed this issue in her J. P. Naik Memorial Lecture on women’s development and the non-aligned movement, which took place in New Delhi in 1988. She said: “There was a strong tendency to separate the problem of the status of women as a specifically ‘women’s’ issue which women discuss for women, and which is in essence directed against the ‘male’ society. The neo-feminist movements, particularly in the Western countries did to a large extent take this position. There were even those who said that the efforts for the establishment of the New International Economic Order did not concern women, since it does not say anything at all about them”.
- 12.
Rada Iveković (as cited in Bonfiglioli 2008, p. 86) says: “Before the conference we did not exist. We happened during that conference”.
- 13.
“Every night we went to the restaurant as women groups. It was a crucial moment; it was the first time in my life that ten women would enter a restaurant and men would say: ‘Look, they are alone’. And we would say: ‘No, it is the ten of us’. For the first time I was going to the restaurant with ten or twenty women only. This was a second turning point for me, the new experience of myself in male space – restaurants. And we had great discussions there… I was out of my mind, I was really happy” (Lepa Mlađenović as cited in Bonfiglioli 2008, p. 90).
- 14.
Delphy (1979, p. 132) also mentions this saying how when going out with the (especially younger) conference participants she would “find again the atmosphere from the beginning of the movement, the excitement that was apparently disproportionate to the actual adventure”.
- 15.
- 16.
This former Yugoslav republic changed its name during my work on this book. It is now called Republic of North Macedonia.
- 17.
There is a reference here to the Arab Spring or the Prague Spring—where spring is a metaphor of revival, new beginning, and emancipatory change. The poster of the event also included a fist as a symbol of resistance frequently used by social movements, also prominently employed by the group Otpor that brought down the Milošević regime.
- 18.
Lesbian Spring was organised by a group of activists supported by the foundation Rekonstrukcija ženski fond as well as in cooperation with other activist groups or initiatives including V(j)eštice, BeFem, Labris, Autonomni ženski centar, Skuvarice, Foto studio Novi dirižabl, Zvučna etnografija, and People’s Hostel.
- 19.
Some invitations stated that one of the reasons for the March was to celebrate 20 years of lesbian activism in Serbia, taking as the point of departure the official registration of the lesbian group Labris in 1995. Other activists thought that this decision erased at least four years of lesbian activist engagement that preceded this formal registration.
- 20.
- 21.
In the online debate about the purpose of the March, gay activist Predrag Azdejković (razotkvirivanje, 15 April 2015, online) said: “A general problem of Serbian LGBT activism is that it likes to put the number 1 in front of many things. Because of this, only last year we had three first regional LGBT conferences!”
- 22.
Women in Black have been dedicated to problematising the urban-rural distinctions in the Serbian political space and there are ever more feminist projects that are done outside of the capital. See also Aleksov (2012).
- 23.
Kurtović (2012, p. 220) writes that, in the context of besieged Sarajevo, urbanity was synonymous with humanistic and cosmopolitan ideals distrustful of institutional politics and insisting upon creative expression as a counterpoint to “patriotism, national pride or tradition”.
- 24.
As Bojan Aleksov (2001, online), an activist in the Belgrade-based Women in Black, stated after Milošević’s fall in 2001: “The main focus of our discontent, Milošević, disappeared, leaving behind less visible, but almost unaltered, structures and mindsets that kept him in power for so many years. The question arises, how much did we change the existing patterns and relationships in society? Were we able to use the power we found in ourselves and in our groups to empower others and to influence decisions about important issues in public policy – and even more importantly, in our everyday lives? Or did we exhaust our new-found power on ourselves?”
- 25.
Some activists who participated in the debate argued in favour of a differentiation between separatism and exclusion. While separatism would be practiced by groups with less political power (e.g., lesbians, black people), exclusion is the privilege of those with more political power (e.g., men). However, this discussion ends up in deadlock if it ignores Yuval-Davis’ (2011) suggestion that an inter-categorical approach to oppression (lesbians, gay, blacks, people in wheelchair, etc.) should be complemented with an intra-categorical approach (not all lesbians are equally oppressed, not all heterosexual men are privileged, etc.).
- 26.
In our volume on Europeanisation, Stubbs and I (Bilić and Stubbs 2016) have argued in favour of a regional (Yugoslav) annually rotating pride along the lines of the Baltic Pride that moves between the capitals of the Baltic states. We also listed at least some benefits that such a manifestation would have. After the experience with the 2015 Lesbian March, perhaps one could imagine such a regional Pride march which would, along with its geographical rotation, have different thematic/identitarian foci that would annually change, so that marches would be, in turn, predominantly lesbian, bisexual, trans, with the same activists appearing in all of them.
- 27.
Perhaps it is not accidental that Judith Butler published Gender Trouble in 1990, once radical lesbian feminism had declined. Butler (as cited in Rudy 2001, p. 208) claims that “an uncritical appeal to the system which constructs gender for the emancipation of ‘women’ will clearly be self-defeating”.
- 28.
For example, one of the contributors to the online discussion said: “I was in the organisers’ team, but I am not anymore” (Nina Đurđević Filipović, razotkvirivanje, 19 May 2015).
- 29.
Brown-Saracino and Ghaziani (2009), who examined the organisation of the 2003 Chicago Dyke March, highlight the tension between the discourse of an inclusive march, on the one hand, and “dyke” as a signifier for a white, urban lesbian identity, on the other.
- 30.
For example, during the 2018 London Pride, a group of around ten participants waved signs saying “Trans activists erase lesbians” and distributed leaflets stating that “the trans movement with the complicity of LGBT politics is coercing lesbians to have sex with men” (Southwell 2018, online). What is more, in January 2019, the US Supreme Court allowed President Trump to enforce his policy of banning certain transgender people from the military (BBC 2019).
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Bilić, B. (2020). Speaking Separately: 2015 Belgrade Lesbian March and Its Antecedents. In: Trauma, Violence, and Lesbian Agency in Croatia and Serbia . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22960-3_5
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