Europeanization and LGBT activism in the post-Yugoslav space

Europe and the European Union are unavoidable, if ambiguous, political references in the post-Yugoslav space. This talk interrogates the forms and implications of the increasingly potent symbolic link between non-heterosexual sexualities, LGBT activism(s), and Europeanisation(s) in all of the Yugoslav successor states. The long EU accession process disseminates discursive tools employed in LGBT activist struggles for human rights and equality and thus elevates certain forms of gay activist engagement and perhaps also non-heterosexuality, more generally, to a measure of democracy, progress, and modernity. In this context, I will also look at how the notion of intersectionality enters the political space of contemporary Serbia and Croatia. By uncovering experiences of multiple oppression and voicing fear and frustration that accompany exclusionary practices, the volume that I will present wonders about the critical potential of intersectionality to generate the basis for wider political alliances and solidarities. 

 
Bojan Bilić is a psychologist and political sociologist doing research on LGBTQ activism and anthropology of non-heterosexual sexualities in the post-Yugoslav and Iberian spaces. He is FCT Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, and Adjunct Professor of Gender and Social Movements in South East Europe at the School of Political Sciences, University of Bologna (Forli' Campus). He is the author of We Were Gasping for Air: (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War Activism and Its Legacy, editor of LGBT Activism and Europeanisation in the Post-Yugoslav Space: On the Rainbow Way to Europe, and co-editor of Resisting the Evil: (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War Contention (with Vesna Janković), Intersectionality and LGBT Activist Politics: Multiple Others in Serbia and Croatia (with Sanja Kajinić), and Lesbian Activism in the (Post-)Yugoslav Space: Sisterhood and Unity (with Marija Radoman, forthcoming).