![Sample our Behavioral Sciences journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110801/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Behavioral-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This research aims to critically examine how the complexity of the ongoing process of “coming out” in small towns and rural spaces in Croatia undermines the imagined hierarchical distinction between rural/urban spaces. The narratives of LGBQ individuals living in these spaces subvert imaginaries of their communities as homogeneously hostile and threatening. Some participants did, however, perceive other spaces as either “gay-friendly” or “deeply homophobic.” As Croatia is transnationally perceived to be a part of a larger “homophobic region,” the construction of the rural/urban hierarchical distinction is (re)produced and (re)configured within discourses that signify Western countries and so-called more developed regions within Croatia as “more open and liberal” as opposed to “more homophobic and backward” spaces. These distinctions between countries, regions, and the rural/urban spaces come into contradiction with each other and are undermined by my interviewees’ own incongruous experiences.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Professor Sanja Potkonjak for her assistance during my fellowship period, including feedback on the initial draft, and Professor Erzsébet Barát for her critical feedback on the research and the draft.
Funding
The article is based on research that I conducted in 2015–2016 with the financial support of NEWFELPRO, an international fellowship mobility program for experienced researchers in Croatia, which is funded by the Government of the Republic of Croatia and the Ministry of Science and Education.
Notes
1. The newspaper Novi List is published in the northwestern coastal city Rijeka and has historically been considered to be leftist/liberal in political orientation, much like the city and the nearby region of Istria. The mayor of Rijeka, for example, who is a member of the social-democratic party SDP, has been in power since 2000.
2. For more on the issue of LGBT homelessness in Croatia and LGBT activists’ responses, see Antonela Marušić and Bojan Bilić’s chapter “Nowhere at Home: Homelessness, Non-Heterosexuality, and LGBT Activism in Croatia,” in Intersectionality and LGBT Activist Politics: Multiple Others in Croatia and Serbia (Marušić & Bilić, Citation2016).
3. In this case, I use the acronym LGBT to reflect the self-identification of the mainstream LGBT organizations that are located in the capital Zagreb, with the exception of the lesbian group LORI that is in Rijeka and the more recently established group Rišpet that is in Split. I use LGBQ for my own research since I did not speak with any transgender-identified individuals.
4. Original text: “U takvim situacijama ljudi iz drugih gradova i sela bježe u Zagreb, misleći da će u Zagrebu pronaći neko utočište, i onda se događa da završe kao beskućnici. A kakve su te ruralne sredine, to je nezamislivo kako je tim ljudima tamo, sa čime se oni susreću. To ide do tih nekih granica za koje se misli da su civilizacijski prevladane.”
5. Examining the emergence of discourses on non-normative sexuality in rural spaces in the United States, Colin Johnson showed how this “binarism” produces seemingly stable, exact opposites and works to “neutralize our awareness of power differentials by obscuring the fact that one term is almost always valorized in relation to the other” (Johnson, Citation2016, p. 11). Although rural spaces are often the target of ridicule and contempt in these discourses, the rural/urban binarism also (re)produces an equally unchanging imaginary of the urban space as one of sexual freedom, openness, and a space for developing LGBT communities, much in the same way that certain countries are perceived to be gay-friendly.
6. I have, however, lived in Croatia for a substantial amount of time in the past 10 years, and I speak Croatian. The interviews were conducted both in English and Croatian.
7. Istria is the westernmost peninsula of Croatia, where there is large support for left/liberal parties such as the Istrian Democratic Assembly (IDS) and the Social Democratic Party of Croatia (SDP). Slavonia is the easternmost part of Croatia, which contains a large proportion of Croatia’s agricultural land and where, just as the southern, predominantly coastal region of Dalmatia, there is large support for the right political party the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ).
8. Johnson wrote, “These assumptions [about what it means to have a sexual identity] also have a tendency to feed back in a way that can cause us to mistake our own place in history and allow ourselves the privilege of demanding far more of others in the way of proof that they were or are somehow like us than we really have a right to expect. […] Politicized self-consciousness is an excellent indicator of identity in many cases because people who are self-consciously politicized are usually happy to speak openly about themselves, their politics, and the relationship between the two. It does not necessarily follow, however, that people who are not obviously politicized in a certain fashion lack a sense of who or what they are” (Johnson, Citation2016, p. 7).
9. I have used pseudonyms for all participants except those who explicitly requested to be named. This particular participant was the only one who chose to fill in a questionnaire rather than be interviewed.
10. Pride marches have been organized in the capital city Zagreb since 2002.
11. The topic of discussing sexuality in the family as a lesbian in Croatia is explored in the film Family Meals/Nije ti život pjesma Havaja (Citation2011), directed by Dana Budisavljević.
12. Split Pride has been organized annually since 2011. Other than the annual Zagreb Pride, there was also one Pride event held in 2014 in the Slavonian city Osijek. However, due to lack of participation, it has not been held since.
13. Tomić Koludrović has written extensively about “retraditionalization” in Croatian society during the 1990s. My intention is not to reduce her work to this single statement, but rather to illustrate how such statements in mainstream media can become embedded in a larger public discourse that may reinforce stereotypes and imaginary boundaries between the “modern” and “pre-modern” parts of society.
14. The Croatian Bureau of Statistics report for 2015 showed that a little less than 30,000 people emigrated from Croatia abroad (95.3% of which were Croatian) of which 41.6% went to Germany (Croatian Bureau of Statistics, Citation2015).
15. In this particular incident, gender normativity seems to be more the issue as evidenced by the fact that Renato, who asked me to use his real name and is the only man to self-identify as being more feminine, was also the only person from all of my participants to have experienced any sort of physical violence. Renato, who outed himself to his entire community via his YouTube channel where he discusses what life is like for a young gay man in Croatia, discussed how he perceived the performance of masculinity as a factor in why he was actually threatened. His YouTube videos can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVBsh2LyOXc.