Russian

Two memoirs describe quite different strategies for enacting gay desire in Beograd in the 80s and 90s. Vjeran Miladinović's Terezin sin (2001) reveals the author's adventures as Merlinka, a well-known transvestite prostitute. Merlinka was the star of Želimir Žilnik's anti-war film Dupe od mramora (Marble Ass, 1994). Uroš Filipović's Staklenac (2002) is the diary of his sexual escapades at more or less the same time.
Heteronormativity requires that biological sex, gender presentation, and sexual orientation be aligned and clearly legible (in other words, if one is biologically male, one should be masculine and desire sex with women); hence the frequent conflation between gender presentation and sexual orientation if a biological male desires men, he must be or act feminine. Cultures, subcultures, and individuals confront this conflation in different ways. Gay male subcultures sometimes adopt "feminine" signs (dress, behavior, language) to signal their desire for other men.
I will look at Vjeran's and Uros's narratives in terms of how their perception and performance of gender intersect with their sexual orientation (both are biological males and both desire sex with men). Vjeran's transvestism is not the standard MTF narrative of a "woman born in a man's body," but rather a strategy to maximize sexual contacts with men, many of whom also desire women. Uroš, on the other hand, disapproves of feminized gay men. Yet in one episode he is attracted to a woman dressed as a boy cruising men, which he finds paradoxical.

Srdjan Karanović's Virgina (Virdžina, 1992) and Želimir Žilnik's Marble Ass (Dupe od mramora, 1994) are both Yugoslav films whose main characters are transvestites. Set in the mythic past, Virgina is about a sworn virgin (virdžina, tobelije, muškobanja) -- a village girl raised as a male because the family had no male children. Virgina shows a culturally conservative society in which the expectation that the virgina will live as a man comes into conflict with her desire to live as she wants. In the west we usually think of transvestites and transgender people as going against societal norms to perform their desired identities. In the case of sworn virgins, it is the patriarchal society that forces the women to live as men.
Marble Ass, on the other hand, features a male-to-female transvestite prostitute who works the streets of Beograd during the war in Bosnia. The film exploits the nationalist expectations of conformity to traditional norms of gender and sexuality. Žilnik in effect reappropriates the nationalists' charges of homosexuality and effeminacy by making the transvestite prostitute the hero of his film.
Virgina and Marble Ass provide an index of cultural expectations about the performance of gender and sexuality in Yugoslavia. The paper uses Judith Butler and Marjorie Garber's work on the construction of gender to analyze these films and place them in their cultural context. Both films call into question essential gender--and, by extension, nationality-- as a stable identity.

Rebecca West described the Yugoslavia of the 1930s as "a country where there is very little homosexuality." Bosnian nationalists echoed her claim in 2004: "we have no fags here." In a region where nationality and militarism were connected with the performance of traditional masculinity, homosexuality was cast as both a threat to military preparedness and a foreign (Western / European) import. Yet three feature films from three successor states challenge this view. Dalibor Matanić's "Fine Dead Girls" (Croatia, 2002) tells the story of two lesbians who move into an apartment building full of misfits in which they turn out to be the most normal ones. In Dragan Marinković's "Take a Deep Breath" (Serbia, 2004), a family drama about youth dissatisfaction with the now compromised older generation, a girl leaves her boyfriend for his sister. The most controversial film, though, was Ahmed Imamović's "Go West" (Bosnia, 2005), which features an ethnically mixed gay male couple who try to escape from Sarajevo at the start of the war.
Vito Russo shows that US filmmakers, while presenting homosexuality in their films, claimed that the films were not about homosexuality. In Central and Eastern Europe, on the contrary, films featuring queer characters are in fact aimed not at showing queerness, but at using the queer as a way to smuggle political meaning into the film. Gay and lesbian characters are used as a metaphor for something else. These three films in many ways conform to that pattern: all three are scripted and shot by straight filmmakers and none shows any evidence of a gay community in Zagreb, Beograd, or Sarajevo. Instead they address issues the filmmakers find more compelling: nationalism, militarism, the moral corruption of the older generation. Yet they provide a window into how nationalism, gender, and sexual orientation intersect in the post-war Balkans.
The paper will analyze these three films to demonstrate this intersection of nationality / ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation and use queer theory to analyze the language of the screenplays closely in terms of gender and sexuality. It will also place them in the context of other queer works from the region, such as the earlier films and the memoirs of Vjeran Miladinović and Uroš Filipović and Marija Buretic-Bogovic's Ljubicice i bic.

Srdjan Karanović's Virgina (Virdžina, 1992) and Želimir Žilnik's Marble Ass (Dupe od mramora, 1994) are both Yugoslav films whose main characters are transvestites. Set in the mythic past, Virgina is about a sworn virgin (virdžina, tobelije, muškobanja) -- a village girl raised as a male because the family had no male children. Virgina shows a culturally conservative society in which the expectation that the virgina will live as a man comes into conflict with her desire to live as she wants. In the west we usually think of transvestites and transgender people as going against societal norms to perform their desired identities. In the case of sworn virgins, it is the patriarchal society that forces the women to live as men.
Marble Ass, on the other hand, features a male-to-female transvestite prostitute who works the streets of Beograd during the war in Bosnia. The film exploits the nationalist expectations of conformity to traditional norms of gender and sexuality. Žilnik in effect reappropriates the nationalists' charges of homosexuality and effeminacy by making the transvestite prostitute the hero of his film.
Virgina and Marble Ass provide an index of cultural expectations about the performance of gender and sexuality in Yugoslavia. The paper uses Judith Butler and Marjorie Garber's work on the construction of gender to analyze these films and place them in their cultural context. Both films call into question essential gender--and, by extension, nationality-- as a stable identity.

Воплощение гомосексуальности в работах Евгения Харитонова и Геннадия Трифонова” [Celebrating Embodied Homosexuality in Evgeny Kharitonov and Gennady Trifonov], tr. Aleksandr Kondakov, in Aleksandr Kondakov, ed., На перепутье: методология, теория и практика ЛГБТ и квир-исследований, СПб: Центр независимых социологических исследований, 2014, 191-201.

The article examines four films-Károly Makk's Egymásra nézve (Another Way, Hungary, 1982), Maja Weiss's Varuh meje (Guardian of the Frontier, Slovenia 2002), Dalibor Matanić's Fine mrtve djevojke (Fine Dead Girls, Croatia, 2002), and Dragan Marinković's Diši duboko (Take a Deep Breath, Serbia, 2004)-as post-communist or dissident national allegories. In all of these films by straight directors the lesbians represent a metaphorical threat to the hetero/sexist national order, but they are unfortunately little more than simulacra. They can be emotionally real (and fun for the straight male audience to ogle), but that ultimately works against them, because instead of representing real lesbian communities, they still have to affirm the stereotype of tragic lesbian destiny straight audiences find comforting.

... Sagasta, Sanja (2004) 'Intervju s Daliborom Matanićem, redateljem filma “Fine mrtve djevojke”', Crow Magazine, 23 Feb., [Online] Available at: http://web ... Jelena Đokić, who played Lana, suggested that it's easier to kiss a girl on screen because, unlike with men, there's no ...