We Do Not Know What Queers Can Do: LGBT Community Between (In)visibility and Culture Industry in Serbia at the Beginning of the 21st Century

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the ways in which LGBT community in Serbia is produced as both visible and invisible in activism and culture industry through affective labor performed as identification with the project of Europeanization of Serbian society (social subjection), and immaterial labor performed within culture industry by participating in the clubbing scene (machinic enslavement). LGBT community in Serbia has a potential for becoming other than a homonormativized group of consumers, especially when those who are produced as invisible are taken into account, and spatially and socially marginalized spaces where alternative forms of culture and politics are made and lived.

KEYWORDS:

• LGBT community
• invisibility
• culture industry
• activism
• affective labor
• immaterial labor

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This proliferation of LGBT nongovernmental organizations had its roots in what Miško Šuvaković, writing about the artworld in Serbia during the 1990s and later, called “Soros realism.” Namely, during the 1990s there appeared numerous centers for contemporary art founded by the Open Society Foundation, whose main financier is George Soros in Central and East Europe, that is, in formerly socialist and communist states. According to Šuvaković, the function of these institutions was to reconfigure art practice according to global (transition in East European states), poetical (emancipation from local modernisms and postmodernisms), cultural (transformation of alternative art in relation to the mainstream, and national art into material for realization of a certain image of society), and political requirements (artworks are used to realize certain practices that promise the civil society to come). Soros realism is, in this sense, “soft and subtle uniformization and normativization of postmodern pluralism and multiculturalism as a criterion of enlightened political liberalism which is to be realized by European societies in transition toward the new century” (Šuvaković, 2002). What is never questioned is exactly this neoliberal capitalist framework that was set up as a goal for the transition from socialist to democratic society. All LGBT nongovernmental organizations that were created within this context, and many were and are still funded by the very same foundation, are basically neoliberal in their politics in the sense that they either do not question or openly support economic and other reforms in the process of European Union accession.

2. Ahmed wrote about “how happiness is used to justify oppression. Feminist critiques of the figure of ‘the happy housewife,’ black critiques of the myth of ‘the happy slave,’ and queer critiques of the sentimentalization of heterosexuality as ‘domestic bliss’ have taught me most about happiness and the very terms of its appeal“ (Ahmed, 2010, p. 2). What his article wants to show is how the promise of happiness is used within the LGBT community to produce LGBT subjects—hence this article does do not pay particular attention to the issues of (un)happiness produced by the all-encompassing patriarchal heteronormativity (for relations between heteronormativity and, specifically, heteronormative masculinity and queer subjects in contemporary Serbian society, see Filipović, 2018).

3. “Feminist killjoys: those who refuse to laugh at the right points; those who are unwilling to be seated at the table of happiness. Feminist killjoys: willful women, unwilling to get along, unwilling to preserve an idea of happiness” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 2).

4. Judith Halberstam developed a concept of low theory “as a mode of accessibility… a kind of theoretical model that flies below the radar, that is assembled from eccentric texts and examples and that refuses to confirm the hierarchies of known that maintain the high in high theory” (2011, p. 16). Low theory is “the name for a counterhegemonic form of theorizing, the theorization of alternatives within an undisciplined zone of knowledge production” (p. 18). So instead of arguing that whatever is considered high art is the only possible critical space offered under the current form of capitalism, Halberstam found potential for resistance in Pixar’s animated films, electro-clash music bends (Lesbians on Ecstasy), and a host of other products of popular culture.

5. These lines reflect the general trend in society and clubbing and bar scenes both gay and straight. Divisions between those who listen to the “turbo-folk” music and those who listen to other, more “urban” kinds of music are present in the society as a whole, and the first decade of the 21st century was marked by both academic and wider cultural discussion about this phenomenon. This “culture war” remains actual still, but there are many voices complicating the previous stance that “turbo-folk” music is reserved for working, uneducated, nonurban, lower class people. Some even claim that it serves to empower women and LGBT individuals by being among the first of popular genres to include more liberal representations of various minorities. For an in-depth analysis of the “turbo-folk” phenomenon, see Čvoro (2014).

6. Most of the events are announced on Facebook and on a gay-serbia.com subforum called Scene that can be found here: https://gay-serbia.com/forum/scena-f55.html.