Na terça-feira, dia 1 de junho de 2021, o LIFE Webinars contará com a participação de Bojan Bilić, investigador pós-doc no ICS-ULisboa.
Over the last few years, the highly charged debates about the role that trans women should play in leftist and feminist struggles have spilt over from the Anglo-American space into the polarized and fragmented field of Serbian activist politics. In the context of rapid impoverishment, omnipresent corruption, and constant erosion of the working class, trans women – one of the most marginalized social groups – have been constructed as an “arch-enemy” provoking painful tensions and draining activist energies.
In this research project I draw upon semi-structured interviews with trans and feminist activists to explore why it is that some strands of Serbian leftist activism – which has had a hard time recovering from the 1990s’ nationalist blow – mark gender difference in such a rigid way that “what is socially peripheral” becomes symbolically central (Hall, 1997) to the point of exclusion, discrimination, and verbal violence. While I focus empirically on the polemics surrounding the activist collective Marks21, whose most visible male members have been particularly vocal about the risks that trans (women’s) emancipation allegedly poses for the precarious achievements of the leftist and feminist movements, I juxtapose it with Praxis, an older Yugoslav Marxist initiative that can hardly boast about its feminist record. Within such an analytical frame, I argue that the capacity of the ‘trans question’ to split the already minuscule left side of the political spectrum is reflective of the long-term conservative and neocolonial dimensions of the Yugoslav/Serbian Left.
Bojan Bilić is a psychologist and political sociologist doing research on LGBTQ activisms and the anthropology of non-heterosexual sexualities and gender variance in the post-Yugoslav space. He holds a PhD in East European Studies from University College London and works as FCT Post-Doc Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon (LIFE Research Group) and adjunct professor of Gender and Social Movements in South East Europe at the School of Political Sciences, University of Bologna. He is the author of We Were Gasping for Air: (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War Activism and Its Legacy (2012) and Building Better Times: Trauma, Violence, and Lesbian Agency in Croatia and Serbia (2020), editor of On the Rainbow Way to Europe: LGBT Activism and Europeanisation in the Post-Yugoslav Space (2016), and co-editor of Resisting the Evil: (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War Contention (with Vesna Janković, 2012), Multiple Others in Croatia and Serbia: Intersectionality and LGBT Activist Politics (with Sanja Kajinić, 2016), Sisterhood and Unity: Lesbian Activism in the (Post-)Yugoslav Space (with Marija Radoman, 2019), and Transgender in the Post-Yugoslav Space: Lives, Activisms, Culture (with Iwo Nord and Aleksa Milanović, 2022).
