Review of Sisterhood & Unity by Eduarda Ferreira

Sisterhood and Unity intertwines academic and activist voices to engage with more than three decades of lesbian activism in the Yugoslav space. Empirically rich contributions uncover a range of lesbian initiatives and the fundamental, but rarely acknowledged, role that lesbian alliances have played in articulating a feminist response to the upsurge of nationalism, widespread violence against women, and high levels of lesbophobia and homophobia in all of the post-Yugoslav states. By offering a distinctly intergenerational and transnational perspective, this collection does not only shed new light on a severely marginalised group of people, but constitutes a pioneering effort in accounting for the intricacies – solidarities, joys, and tensions – of lesbian activist organising in a post-conflict and post-socialist environment. With a plethora of authorial standpoints and innovative methodological approaches, the volume challenges the systematic absence of (post-)Yugoslav lesbian activist enterprises from recent social science scholarship. Contemporary women's history and global queer studies are both the richer for this exceptional example of lesbian-led activism and scholarship. Bilić, Radoman and their contributors are equally driven by a resolve for lesbians' courage and friendship in the face of patriarchal nationalism not to be forgotten, and an urge to resist their struggles being co-opted by neoliberal and conservative forces. Thinking transnationally and acting locally, their activist-academic insight and their collective ways of writing and knowing resonate well beyond, yet always also address, the (post-)Yugoslav semi-periphery from which they speak. Catherine Baker, University of Hull, UK An exciting volume that fills a significant gap in the literature, which all too often fails to examine the important role of lesbians and lesbian activism in the political culture of the region. Janice Irvine, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA This book is an invaluable repository of reflections on lesbian activist movements and initiatives, documenting them on their own terms and in their own words. Skillfully negotiating between academic and activist practices, temporalities, styles and concerns, its intellectual, activist and – for some – therapeutic interventions will shape this field over the coming years. Andrew Hodges, Leibniz-Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Germany

2022

The Political and Social History of Sexual and Gender Dissidence in the USSR and Post-Soviet Space, 2021

Whether in the Russian Empire, the USSR, or in the newly independent successor states of the region, power framed homosexuality in various ways, sometimes directly leading to medical or legal repression, other times leading to forms of social censure. The Soviet experience offers a sufficiently singular case to justify separate study : the Stalinist anti-sodomy law was enacted in each of the Soviet republican penal codes before the Second World War, while several of the post-war Warsaw Pact socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe either lacked such a law, or eliminated it. In the Soviet republics, there were notable differences in the penalties for sodomy in the law, and such differences in approach would on occasion increase after the dismemberment of the USSR. Cahiers du monde russe wishes to investigate “sexual and gender dissidence” in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We wish to take account of medical-legal regulation of this dissent, but also illuminate the effects that this regulation doubtless had on queer subjectivities : moments of self-oppression, denunciation, counter-discourses and other strategies of survival. Analyses of literary and artistic works are welcomed for they may constitute the most likely place for the construction of queer subjectivities. Likewise, the LGBT press of the 1990s and early 2000s, emerging in the capitals and the provinces, with its readers’ voices reflected in correspondence and other materials, offers opportunities to hear and analyse queer voices. Titles and abstracts submission deadline : 6 September 2019. Short project abstracts (500 words maximum) should be sent to : sovgenderdissent_cmr[at]ehess.fr. Please include name, institutional affiliation, and email address in all correspondence. Authors of selected proposals will be notified by 20 October 2019. Languages : French, English, Russian. Manuscripts submission deadline : 20 May 2020. Maximum article length : 11,000 words (space characters and notes included) Publication date : July-September 2021. For additional information, please contact : Editors : Arthur Clech, Dan Healey, Francesca Stella : sovgenderdissent_cmr[at]ehess.fr or Valérie Mélikian, cmr[at]ehess.fr Without seeking to be exhaustive, the following offers some strands of reflection about areas where further exploration would illuminate “blank spots” in current historiography.

Transgender in the Post-Yugoslav Space: Lives, Activisms, Culture , 2022

Sextures: An Academic Journal for Sexualities and Cultures, 2015

Bojan Bilić · Marija Radoman Editors Lesbian Activism in the (Post-)Yugoslav Space Sisterhood and Unity, 2019

Over the last three decades, Ljubljana has witnessed a series of auton- omous lesbian feminist and queer feminist initiatives that have mostly grown in squats. In this chapter, we, both long-term activists, provide an overview of the development of the autonomous lesbian and queer feminist initiatives in Slovenia, primarily focusing on the Red Dawns festival collective, the Lesbian Feminist University group and the Anarcho-Queer-Feminist Collective Rog. We intertwine the political notion of autonomy with the practices of squatting because we con- sider both of them particularly relevant for the early and contemporary alternative/non-mainstream political organising. Autonomous organ- isations and groups defend our dignity and define our “active subjec- tivities” (Lugones 2003) against the oppressive and liberalist structures that produce unlawful citizens, peripheral subjectivities, and under- ground cultures. This is achieved through creating a space for the much needed political content—by taking, or more precisely, re-appropriating it unlawfully—which is the case with lesbian and queer feminist squat- ting. Creation of such space is achieved not only by taking it physically, but also by occupying our own identities. We consider our analysis part of the continuous autonomous fem- inist activists’ struggle against hierarchical narratives that central- ise, marginalise or exclude the most radical features of the movement itself. Drawing upon intersectional political affinities, we argue that the autonomous lesbian/queer feminist organising has made an impact on the development and the proliferation of feminist consciousness and actions that involve and engage all liberation movements and their sub- jects. Our text constitutes a celebration of these processes as well as an invitation for their continual rethinking.

Resisting the exhaustion provoked by postsocialist revamped patriarchies that tried – yet again – to harden the line between ‘men’ and ‘women’, our volume explores the thus far insufficiently recognised histories and politics of trans lives, activisms, and culture across the post-Yugoslav states. Written by an interdisciplinary collective of authors engaged in transnational trans struggles, this book uncovers a diversity of gender embodiments while wondering about (and at) how they have navigated the murky waters of war, racism, capitalism, and transphobia. By unleashing the knowledge concentrated in trans lives, we do not only run counter to trans erasures in Eastern Europe, but underscore our potentials for survival, self-transformation, and engagement in politically challenging circumstances. As we behold the painful wreckage of the Yugoslav socialist project, embracing the proliferation of gender possibilities is perhaps one way towards novel forms of being together. --- This path-breaking collection of post-Yugoslavian transgender scholarship provides vital insight into critical refigurations of trans discourse on Europe’s eastern periphery that we in the West would do well to heed. Susan Stryker, Executive Editor, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly --- A thematic series of studies on the post-Yugoslav LGBTQ existence and activist engagement, written and edited by regional LGBTQ activists and scholars, has been steadily growing over the last decade. The chief editor of the series, Bojan Bilić, invited respective fellow editors to help him coordinate three groups of thematic specialists: in 2016, Sanja Kajinić for the volume about intersectionality and LGBTQ activism in Croatia and Serbia; in 2019, Marija Radoman for the book on the history and politics of lesbian activism, and in 2022, Aleksa Milanović and Iwo Nord for a collection about trans lives, activisms, and culture. Like the preceding ones, the latest, trans-related, volume not only collects and interweaves some ‘still rather dispersed threads’ of our lives and experiences, but it affords them political relevance and provides a platform upon which we can acknowledge each other in feminist, activist solidarity. In such a way, this unusual research initiative inspires further exploration and makes our community stronger, more resilient, and politically more self-reflexive. We need all of that if we are to respond to the conservative encroachments upon democracy which have been taking place throughout the post-Yugoslav region and beyond. Maja Pan, lesbian feminist activist and independent scholar, Maribor, Slovenia --- This precious volume combines empathy with knowledge and by doing so promises to augment our possibilities to freely experience and express ourselves in our region that has gone through such harsh times… We need books like this to empower us to live a life without aggression, violence, pathologisation… to encourage us to go beyond those suffocating frames that want to determine who we are and what it is that we can be. Agatha Milan Đurić, Geten, Center for LGBTIQA People's Rights, Belgrade, Serbia --- This richly textured and important book could not have come at a more welcome time... We have been long aware of the questions we would need to ask to understand the conditions for trans experiences and activism in the post-Yugoslav space, but unable to answer them without recourse to a work of this sensitivity and depth. That work has now arrived. Catherine Baker, University of Hall --- I know this book, like the edited volumes that preceded it, to be a labour of love, a sign of commitment to the cause, and a tangible expression of a deep desire to hear a wider range of voices than is usual in mainstream (and even so-called alternative) academic publishing. Paul Stubbs, Institute of Economics, Zagreb

2017

This issue of E-rea examines the temporalities of space and the spatialities of time in the area of colonial and postcolonial Commonwealth Studies viewed through the prism of the Geohumanities, with an emphasis on historiographies that transcend the national or underpass it at the infra-state scale of relations, while overflowing conventional timelines and adopting perspectives that lengthen focus and broaden analytical scope, connecting social and cultural trajectories across disciplinary boundaries. The authors draw upon the methodologies of colonial and postcolonial history, geohistory and geopolitics, memory studies, commemorative politics, geopoetics and literary mapping, media studies and the digital humanities.

Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 2004

Zeszyty Łużyckie. Journal for Minority Studies, 2023

The histories of LGBTIQ+ communities often heavily rely on historiographies of democratization and teleologies of progress. As a result, LGBTIQ+ communities seem to have become agents solely in the light of regime change while their socialist pasts have been more difficult to access. Instead of searching for a starting point of LGBTIQ+ activism in (Post-)Yugoslavia, this essay tries to reconnect multiple points in time where LGBTIQ+ actors staged protest and sought for liberation. Through the lens of repetition, I want to revisit the discourses and trajectories of LGBTIQ+ activism in Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav space. By looking into various configurations of queer activism – from “homosexual socialization” in socialism to EuroPride in 2022 – I want to provide an analytical framework within which the radical potential of queerness can be uncovered beyond ready-made categories of transitional democracies or minority protection rights.