Ex-Yugoslav masculinities under female gaze, or why men skin cats, beat up gays and go to war

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Notes

1. The “Reverse Pygmalion” refers to a plot that pits a woman from a higher civilizational level with a man from a lower civilizational level in ambivalent romantic relationships that as a rule end tragically. I argue that it is always the upper class urban girls who cultivate untamed highlanders, and female Western journalists who fall for the highlander's urban equivalents, such as “noble criminals,” and almost never the reverse scenarios. The cultivated, civilized males, at all levels of opposition, if they play any part in these narratives at all, are usually shown as effete, decadent or impotent. There seems to be no place for a virile Westerner who sweeps the Balkan woman off her feet in the Serbian imaginary, nor is there a trace of a supremely self-confident Serbian Higgins to raise a Serbian Eliza Doolittle from her low status. In Serbia, to put it simply, Harry Higgins tends to be a woman while Eliza Doolittle tends to be a man.

2. There is a scene in Tone Bringa's 1992 documentary We Are All Neighbours where a young Bosnian man who has lost his job embarrassingly accepts his wife's dishwashing instructions in front of a Western female anthropologist's camera gaze. A Serbian feature film that documented the travails of U.N. sanctions and hyperinflation, Dnevnik uvreda'93 (A Diary of Insults) is, among other things, a story of male fragility born of rigidity and female pragmatic flexibility. While he sinks into depression when his stable world crashes down, she starts knitting caps and selling them on the street (something he, as an intellectual, would never stoop to). Like Andersen's Matchbox girl, however, she dies of freezing (Sotra, 1994).