240236 VU Actual Debates and Interventions (2024W)

A socialist experiment and a modernising project, post-Second World War Yugoslavia struggled to cut through class hierarchies, emancipate women, suture deeply entrenched racial/ethnic and religious divisions, attenuate poverty, promote education, strengthen peace and international cooperation, and help undo the consequences of decade-long colonial domination across the non-Western world. However, socialist modernity is imbued with ambivalence: to engage with the Yugoslav socialist state intellectually (and) emotionally means to enter into a realm of contradictions. In spite of its progressive legislation, socialist Yugoslavia did not manage to dismantle oppressive matrices it inherited from its political antecedents. Quite early on it became clear not only that social equality and the elimination of class distinction were a chimera, but also that the socialist revolution probably would not be able to cross the family threshold and organise intimate lives on a non-patriarchal and non-heteronormative basis. More than anything, streams of racism continued to flow along its North-South axis and the nationalist sentiment within the constitutive republics often went counter to the Party’s programmatic slogan of ‘brotherhood and unity’, culminating in the armed conflicts of the 1990s.

Within this Ringvorlesung we set out from the premise that in the context of global (academic) coloniality, the semiperiphery in which the Yugoslav space is positioned does not figure as a site of knowledge production; rather, if anything, in the global knowledge market its insights are treated as partial, limited, inferior, and perhaps even irrelevant (Blagojevic, 2009). Located between the ‘centre’ and the ‘periphery’, the semi-periphery is a sphere of social hybridity with its own logic which at once embraces and resists Western/Anglo-Saxon explanatory paradigms. Blagojevic (2009) argued that the semiperiphery is constituted by a crossroads of oppositions which may look like a 'location of a discursive void': it is at the same time 'white/non-white, European/noneuropean, postcolonial/nonpostcolonial, citizen/noncitizen, and gender/nongender'. Consistently presented as Europe’s unruly misogynist, homophobic and transphobic Other, Eastern Europe/‘the Balkans’/the post-Yugoslav space is close enough to the Western ‘core’ to deserve ‘being taken care of’, but still way too far to be considered eligible for admission to the ‘First World’ (Kulpa, 2014).

Over the course of ten lectures which bring academia and activism, two nourishing vessels of feminism, into a politically productive symbiosis, we will, on the one hand, engage with socialist Yugoslavia’s painful heritage of cis-, heteronormative, and nationalist authoritarianism so that we can temper its captivating call at our time of pronounced dispossession, capitalist crisis, and insecurity. We will take a look at how along with the already familiar colonial methods of resource extraction and labour exploitation, LGBT communities have been added to the panoply of neocolonial instruments with which the Western ‘core’ conditions, teaches, and effectively colonises ‘its’ semiperipheral East. These new gender and sexual subjectivities that are (ab)used as agents of colonisation operate in parallel with a potent suppression of socialist achievements. On the other hand, however, we will also explore how novel understandings of gender and sexuality have the potential to replenish exhausted postsocialist imaginaries with new political content and perhaps even generate new paradigms of inclusion.