Queering Ethnicity in the First Gay Films From Ex-Yugoslavia

Abstract

Between 2002 and 2005 four of the Yugoslav successor states produced major feature films with lesbian or gay protagonists: Maja Weiss's Guardian of the Frontier (Slovenia, 2002), Dalibor Matanić's Fine Dead Girls (Croatia, 2002), Dragan Marinković's Take a Deep Breath (Serbia, 2004), and Ahmed Imamović's Go West (Bosnia and Hercegovina, 2005). As with other films from Eastern Europe that portray queer characters, all of these films were shot by straight directors, and the queer characters are not representations of real local queer communities, but instead are used as metaphors to address topics the filmmakers find more important, such as ethnicity and national identity. The ethnic hatreds that fueled the wars of the 1990s were mobilized through the heterosexual matrix. In these films anxieties about ethnicity are worked out through plots involving queer sexuality, though they work differently for male and female couples: female bodies can be conventionally objectified by the heterosexual male gaze, while male couples become the focus for anxieties about male rape.

Keywords:

• queer
• ethnicity
• Yugoslavia
• film
• Slovenia
• Bosnia
• Croatia
• Serbia

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Research for this paper was supported by a grant from the International Research & Exchanges Board as well as support from the Lillian Robinson Scholar program at Concordia University in Montreal, and from Middlebury College.

Notes

1. Of the four films, only Go West had state funding from Federal TV of BiH; Fine Dead Girls was considered by the state HTV for funding, but denied. Guardian of the Frontier was co-produced and co-written with Peter Braatz (Taris Films), Weiss's German husband, and another co-writer listed, Brock Norman Brock, is British. Go West was co-produced with Alka Films (Croatia) and Jeanne Moreau (France). The other films had private funding in-country.

2. Agnieszka Graff has analyzed a similar pattern in Poland, where anxieties about joining the EU was expressed via attitudes about lesbians and gay men: homophobia became a mark of Polish difference and national pride (Graff 2006, 2008, 2010).

3. Such violence has been realized at several gay pride marches or queer festivals in the region. The first gay pride march in Beograd in 2001 was broken up by overwhelming violence by football hooligans and anti-gay church groups. The Queer Sarajevo Festival in 2008 was attacked and shut down by hooligans, and the second Beograd Gay Pride was called off twenty-four hours before it was to take place, because the police could not guarantee protection from right-wing groups like Obraz and 1389.

4. Interview with author, Beograd, 9 November, 2007.

5. Confirmed by an Internet search of the songs at http://guslarskepesme.com on 27 August, 2008.

6. Interview with author, Sarajevo, 14 September, 2007.

7. Interview with author, Sarajevo, 14 September, 2007.

8. Interview with author, Sarajevo, 14 September, 2007.

9. Another film, Želimir Žilnik's Marble Ass, used the queer topic directly in opposing the war. On the film and the transvestite prostitute who stars in it, see Kevin Moss (2005, 2006b).