Introduction: In post- Yugoslav trans worlds

Transgender in the Post-Yugoslav Space Bilić, Bojan, Nord, Iwo, Milanović, Aleksa Published by Bristol University Press Bilić, Bojan, et al. Transgender in the Post-Yugoslav Space: Lives, Activisms, Culture. Bristol University Press, 2022. Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/102932. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/102932 [ Access provided at 13 Oct 2022 08:14 GMT from University of California, Berkeley ] Introduction: In post-Yugoslav trans worlds Bojan Bilić, Iwo Nord, and Aleksa Milanović Towards the end of December 2020, as we were entering the most intense phase of our work on this volume, the three of us joined many of our friends, colleagues, and co-authors in signing a statement with which a group of Belgrade-based organisations and activists condemned transphobia and sent a message of support to trans people across the region.1 This document was a response to the letter2 that another set of activist initiatives published to show solidarity with the Zagreb Centre for Women’s Studies. They felt compelled to do so given that the Centre came under fire once it was revealed that its newly elected executive director had reposted some of the controversial comments with which J.K. Rowling disputed trans women’s right to identify as women. Trans hostility, which was (also) uncritically imported from middle class-oriented fractions of British feminism, quickly merged with the more radical and conservative currents within the field of regional activist politics to form a particularly regressive hybrid (Bilić, this volume). All of a sudden wombs, chromosomes, hormones, and genes came to be tossed around in endless angry debates similar to those one might imagine taking place at a biology symposium (Bakić, 2020). Not only did such an incursion of essentialising attitudes, accompanied by spirals of cynicism, inflict a great deal of personal damage, but it also offered us an opportunity to witness how our feminist and leftist arenas, already reduced to the point of almost complete political irrelevance, became fractured yet again, this time along a new – trans – line. When the three of us met in the spring of 2019 for an initial brainstorming on how a volume about trans lives, activisms, and culture in the post-Yugoslav space should look, hardly could anyone have imagined that we3 would find ourselves in the midst of a ‘TERF war’ (Pearce et al, 2020) by the time of its completion. Although we came together prompted by the need for an anthology that would start documenting the still rather dispersed threads of trans existence and activist engagement in our region, little did we expect that the importance of our joint endeavour would increase at such a pace. Perhaps we should have seen it coming. On closer inspection, this latest reconfiguration is little more than yet another symptom of the process through which fragments of the regional feminist ‘scene’ have distanced themselves from the emancipatory potential of their socialist past and become 1 Transgender in the Post-Yugoslav Space increasingly entangled with the authoritarian and patriarchal matrices that have been governing social life over the last few decades. Sadly though, that reactionary anti-trans tsunami that has travelled across national borders over the last few years has not spared some of our most prominent feminist teachers. Much to our regret, the letter of support to the Zagreb Centre included activists of the internationally renowned Women in Black who were throughout the 1990s determined to stand in the way of the nationalistically and religiously driven movement that tried to yet again relegate women to the sphere of domesticity and reproduction (Bilić, 2012a, 2012b). If there is one feminist lesson that has traversed our turbulent turn of the century, it is this collective’s founding principle that ‘we should not let ourselves be deceived by our own’. Many of us matured politically as we struggled to embrace this powerful message that invited us as a matter of urgency to raise our voice against oppressive family arrangements, renounce spurious but potentially lethal national allegiances, and demonstrate courage of thought and action by rejecting what the hypertrophied patriarchal ‘tradition’ had in store for our futures. Nowhere else is that critical charge to become worthy of its feminist name than in its capacity to reinvigorate the calcified positions of our own feminist pioneers and commit itself to loosening their definitional grip on our gender embodiments when they start holding on a bit too tightly. However, if the time was ripe for us to stand up to and perhaps also part ways with some of our acclaimed feminist predecessors in order to create a space for new genders and gender terminologies, this is not to say that we could easily and unambiguously take refuge in the opposite camp. Like in so many other instances in which the burdens of oppression painfully press the body calling for a resolute counteroffensive, it seemed that the task of steering regional feminism away from its discriminatory course could not afford more sophisticated verbal calibrations. We thought that this political rupture might have perhaps announced the emergence of a new language, one that would try to step out of unending loops of erasure and help suture the wounds inflicted by decades of racist, misogynous, homophobic, and transphobic denigration. We hoped that new affective horizons of togetherness would have been suggested as an alternative to our perpetual political suffocation, which often occurs also within our own circles, those ever-shrinking territories of inclusive feeling and knowing. Alas, in alarming circumstances in which ways of life and potentially life itself may be at stake, fragile imaginaries of emancipation are even more likely to retreat in front of authoritarian structures that weave the tissue of regional sociality and extend their resilient threads deep into the pores of (supposedly) liberatory mobilisations. Such moments of particularly high tension reveal the extent to which the counterrevolutionary force of Yugoslavia’s dissolution has shackled vocabularies of freedom pervading 2 Introduction also the fields of (declaratively) progressive organising.4 In this regard, as three activist scholars dedicated to critically strengthening both the regional and more widely transnational cause of gender and sexual diversity, we were disheartened by the view of the LGBTI Equal Rights Association for the Western Balkans and Turkey that the statement of the Centre for Women’s Studies’ new director was ‘yet another example of the dangerous influence that academia has in igniting trans exclusionary narratives in broader public which further endangers the lives of trans people’ (ERA, 2020, online). These two positions, trans-hostile conservative feminism, on the one hand, and trans-affirming activist anti-academism, on the other, constitute the eye of a needle through which we want to pass with this volume. As a group of activist scholars and research-appreciative activists, we have come together led by our interest in the dynamics through which the transnational intensification of trans-related engagement has played out in the postYugoslav space, a geopolitical semi-periphery characterised by the wounds of armed conflicts and transition from socialism to variegated neoliberal capitalisms. With this introduction we do not intend to offer an exhaustive historical account of the (post-)Yugoslav ‘transgender phenomenon’ that could serve as a background for the ensuing chapters – it is yet to be written and may hopefully be inspired and buttressed by this book. Rather, we would here like to cast into relief some of our major political concerns that act as a force of cohesion for all of our authors’ contributions. In the first introductory section we take a look at the increased visibility of trans-related issues in post-Yugoslav public spheres and social science scholarship (Milanović, 2015, 2019; Vidić, 2021) examining the implications of its coincidence with both the erasure of progressive socialist legacies, on the one hand, and the expansion of the European Union as the major neocolonial political actor in the region, on the other. We then expand on the reasons why our research encompasses the entire Yugoslav space perceiving it as a political formation that offered a vision of modernity different from the ones usually associated with contemporary capitalist globalisations. With both this and previous collections (Bilić and Janković, 2012; Bilić, 2016a; Bilić and Kajinić, 2016; Bilić and Radoman, 2019), we approach nonnormative genders and sexualities as a particularly revealing prism through which to look at how the Yugoslav socialist project was imagined and put into practice, why it is that it came crashing down in such a destructive, traumatising fashion, and how some of its most emancipatory elements could be resurrected in novel, queer/trans ways. We then consider a range of epistemological challenges that such an endeavour entails and focus on the ways in which trans people and the post-Yugoslav semi-periphery – as well as the two of them together – may address the world on their own terms and in their own rapidly evolving narratives. 3 Transgender in the Post-Yugoslav Space Challenges of the trans turn When sociological and anthropological research about ‘non- normative’ sexualities in Eastern Europe started intensifying, especially in the wake of Kulpa and Mizielińska’s (2011) ground-breaking volume De-Centring Western Sexualities, many of us were concerned about what ‘LGBT’ might mean in our non-Western geo-political environments. Disclaimers were sometimes needed to warn against the potentially misleading nature of the fast-spreading acronym. Not only did that string of identity letters (growing longer over the years) place together gays and lesbians who, both in the post-Yugoslav space and transnationally, have often opted for separate liberatory trajectories, but it also included two groups of people, namely bisexual-5 and transgenderidentified persons, that at the time, were hardly visible, especially in terms of activist representation. In other words, the T began circulating within Eastern European activist networks before becoming more firmly anchored in a corpus of political, social, legal,6 and economic claims. Mizielińska and Kulpa account for this ‘inclusion before coming into being’ (p 14) by arguing that there was a ‘temporal disjuncture’, a fissure that has opened up between Western, Anglo-American (or, as they also say, perhaps only American) lexicons forged in long-term activist struggles, on the one hand, and Eastern European non-heterosexual and gender-transformative mobilisations, on the other. While the history of trans emancipation in the West indeed justified the broadening of non-cis-heteronormative politics into ‘LGBT’7, in Eastern European contexts, the T was in the beginning not only a ‘purely discursive invocation’ (p 14) but also an example of the process through which Western categories lose some of their political content as they are removed from their places of origin and transferred/translated into new social settings. In the post-Yugoslav space, more specifically, the LGBT activist shell also started acquiring its T substance around 2005 even though the acronym had been used already from the beginning of the century as it ‘felt like “the right thing to do”’ (Hodžić, Poštić, and Kajtezović, 2016, p 37) in anticipation of more visible trans activists.8 The 2005 conference Transgressing Gender: Two is not Enough for Gender (E)quality, which took place in Zagreb, Croatia, was particularly relevant for initiating regional debates about gender diversity and inaugurating a period of dynamic activist engagement.9 This development has been also reflected in our series of interlocking books about post-Yugoslav feminist anti-war and LGBT activisms: the necessity and the wish to pay more attention to trans-related topics rather than subsume them under the wider ‘LGBT’ label first led to a footnote (Bilić, 2016b), then to a chapter (Hodžić, Poštić, and Kajtezović, 2016), and steadily grew to such an extent to require an entire volume.10 4 Introduction This counterhegemonic process of ‘footnote expansion’, which reflects the uneven and contentious transnational intensification of ‘non-normative’ sexual and gender politics over the last three decades, has to a great extent run parallel with the East-bound enlargement of the European Union and the painful neocolonial peripheralisation and ethnic fragmentation of the Yugoslav space. A lot of homophobic and transphobic violence that has taken place over that period could be traced back to the distinctly ambivalent character of the regional ‘transition’ to capitalism: while it has, on the one hand, foreclosed economic possibilities and rapidly impoverished and depopulated the Yugoslav successor states, it provided the background against which various LGBT-related grievances found their way into the public sphere more assertively than ever before (Sears, 2005). This coincidence is particularly relevant for the category of transgender, which has experienced dramatic transnational dissemination while neoliberal capitalism consolidated itself around the world at the expense of dispossession, environmental devastation, and death (Stryker, 2006; Kancler, 2016; Stryker and Aizura, 2013; Gržinić, Kancler, and Rexhepi, 2020). Such simultaneity may imply a misleading conceptual symbiosis between gender diversity and capitalist predatory pursuits of surplus value on a global scale. To counter the risks of this conceptual pairing we have striven to continuously politicise gender and sexuality and carve out a niche for our volume(s) within that often subdued tradition of decolonial scholarship, which approaches them as a site of resistance that interacts with other operators of power, most notably race and class. In doing so, we have found some breathing space in the intellectual feat of Black feminists and feminists of colour with which they struggled to protect themselves from a social structure immersed in centuries of racist oppression. Combining Quijano’s (2000, 2007) foundational insight that Western modernity has an inextricable colonial undercurrent11 characterised by racialisation and violence, with work on intersectionality (for example, Crenshaw, 1989, 1991), Lugones (2008) arrived at the analysis of what she called ‘the modern/ colonial gender system’. According to her, Quijano uncritically embraced the (Western) Eurocentred, capitalist understanding of gender through biological dimorphism, and the patriarchal and heterosexual organisation of social relations. In other words, Lugones argued that the gender binary system, in the way in which it was imposed on colonised populations, along with various forms of exploitation, slavery, and servitude, was itself infused with racist Eurocentrism. Binary sexual difference was a colonial invention with a distinctly racialising function: it negated the humanity of the colonised peoples by leaving them out of the Western understanding of (proper) ‘man’ and ‘woman’12 while also working towards the erasure of alternative gender systems or forms of social organisation, which did not afford primary importance to sexual difference. Given that from the 5 Transgender in the Post-Yugoslav Space cognitive perspective of Eurocentred hegemony all human relations were articulated ‘fictionally, in biological terms’ (Lugones, 2008, p 2), social class ended up resting on the idea that gender and race were inseparable categories (gender/race). With this in mind, transgender lives and non- normative gender embodiments can hardly be recovered without engaging not only with the ways in which gender has been historically embedded in binary-patriarchalcolonial matrices but also with today’s rapid diffusion of transgender as a notion stemming from White Eurocentred modernity. While long-term activist efforts have recently led to a formal (albeit still not equally applied) depathologisation of trans identities in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) and the visibility of trans people has been steadily increasing, this is far from suggesting that the powerful colonial/racialising mechanisms of (trans) liveability differentiation have been dismantled. Continual reconfigurations of global neoliberal capitalisms enable the appearance of new forms of subjectivity affording them/us access to the public sphere only if they/we can be exploited as a market niche and associated with the profit-oriented modes of production and consumption (Valentine, 2007). In this regard, transnational circulations of the Western category of transgender continuously supply conceptual vocabularies for articulating gender diversity beyond the borders of the Western world while at the same time perpetuating engines of differentiation that operate along racial/ethnic, class, ability, and other intersecting lines (Kancler, 2016). Things get even more complicated when we add the semi-periphery, socialism, and post-socialism to the violent colonial equation. Located between the ‘centre’ and the ‘periphery’, the semi-periphery is a sphere of social hybridity with its own logic that at once embraces and resists Western/ Anglo- Saxon explanatory paradigms. Reworking and going beyond Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis on the basis of her academic experience in the post-Yugoslav space, Blagojević (2009, see also Blagojević and Yair, 2010) argued that the semi-periphery 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 homophobic Other, Eastern Europe/‘the Balkans’/the post-Yugoslav space is a site of geo-political ambiguity: it 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). Having experienced socialism as an interruption of and a dam to the Western capitalist temporality, Eastern Europe after 1989 – and the post-Yugoslav space after the 1990s – had to be (re)set on the course of Western modernity. It has thus been pushed into a didactical, hegemonic 6 Introduction relation with its Western counterpart, which sees it as a region locked in a ‘post-communist’ transition that is supposed to asymptomatically run towards (while never really achieving) the Western European liberal model of rights (Kulpa, 2014). Western activist struggles (which have largely departed from their leftist, revolutionary origins in our homonationalist and homonormative times; Puar, 2007) have transformed non-normative sexualities and non-binary gender embodiments – exactly those that (mostly) used to be suppressed through Western colonial domination – to such an extent that they can nowadays figure as a tool of this neoliberal pedagogy (Akintola, 2017). 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’ semi-peripheral East. These new gender and sexual subjectivities that are (ab)used as agents of colonisation operate in parallel with a potent suppression of socialist legacies. They create a major challenge for grassroots intersectionally sensitive and anti-racist mobilisations by moulding LGBT activist imaginaries in specifically identitarian terms and making it hard for them to build upon locally-grounded emancipatory achievements. Trans Yugoslavias: towards the future that already was In his widely celebrated The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon (1961/2004) argues that colonialism’s major ambition is to become omnipresent: it is not content solely with the force of physical coercion, but it aims at taking possession of the native’s past in order to master, disfigure, and eventually destroy it. In this regard, the aggressive post-socialist evacuations of socialist pasts are among the most conspicuous evidence of colonial operationality in Fanon’s terms. Ever since the 1990s, the Yugoslav socialist past has been subjected to overwhelming attacks of amnesia. Along one of its axes, the so-called ‘Western Balkans’13 functions as an artificial formation that should fill the void left in the wake of Yugoslavia’s disappearance. This neologism, arising from the unstable politics of European Union expansion, announces a technocratic subdivision of the Balkans that fragments our cultural space, unravels historical affinities among the Yugoslav peoples, and works towards distancing them/us from their/our own non-capitalist traditions.14 On the other hand, the multinational Yugoslav socialist state vanishes under the 1990s’ nationalist avalanche that it was supposed to keep in check: strong currents of revisionism invade its anti-fascist foundations and erase the socialist federation because it can not be rendered compatible with the lucrative narratives of ethnic exclusivity (Milekić, 2021). Like our previous volumes, with this one too we are determined to swim against the current of such profound forgetting. As a matter of fact, the 7 Transgender in the Post-Yugoslav Space critically approached Yugoslavia constitutes an indispensable ingredient of our decolonial and anti-nationalist commitment.15 This is not only due to the fact that its geographical frame contains our shared, intimate memories and institutional structures, but Yugoslavia – the one that emerged out of the People’s Liberation Struggle against Nazism and Fascism – enabled our up to now closest encounter with modernity that was detached from the colonising impulse. A socialist experiment and a modernising project of unprecedented proportions in the history of the Yugoslav peoples, Yugoslavia could, from our today’s vantage point, be regarded as a fragile queer entity: a state in constant flux, it struggled (certainly declaratively and to a certain extent also in practice) 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 nonWestern world (Bilić, 2019). If we push this logic further, in the context of our current volume, we could even discern some of its metaphorically trans dimensions. The erasures of Yugoslavia as a socialist idea have occluded the fact that it was a state strongly committed to problematising – together with others – binary oppositions in world politics. Yugoslavia’s complexity often slips through the binary-oriented Cold War vocabularies in the same way in which the gender dichotomy obscures a multiplicity of gender embodiments and non-binary gender (hi)stories. It is, therefore, perhaps not entirely accidental that our work coincides with the increasing interest in recovering the Non-Aligned Movement of which Yugoslavia was one of the founding and most important members (Stubbs, 2020; Videkanić, 2020). That monumental project of international cooperation, which unfolded across diverse political, social, economic, and cultural scales, expanded Yugoslav horizons towards Africa, Asia, and Latin America drawing the contours of alternative, non-colonial globalisations and endeavouring to give the world more than two relevant actors. Yugoslavia was, thus, essential for our experience of decolonial political hybridity and non-binarity and with this volume we would like to add it as a precedent to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the hegemonic rise of the United States, the development of the European Union, and new configurations of global capitalism, all of which, according to Stryker (2006), have led to a re-examination of conceptual binaries paving the way for the appearance of trans studies. Surely, however, the visions of socialist modernity are imbued with ambivalence: to engage with the Yugoslav state intellectually (and) emotionally means to enter into a realm of contradictions and position oneself in the vicinity of disappointment. As queers we know all too well that ‘any history of actualized utopian communities would be replete with failures’ (Muñoz, 2009, p 27). In spite of its progressive legislation and the 8 Introduction enthusiasm of many of its people, socialist Yugoslavia did not manage to dismantle oppressive matrices that it inherited from its political antecedents. Quite early on it became clear not only that equality and the elimination of class distinction were a chimera but also that the socialist revolution probably would not be ‘able to cross the threshold of the family’ (Morokvašić, 1986, p 127) and organise intimate lives on a non-patriarchal and nonheteronormative basis. More than anything, streams of racism continued to flow along its North–South axis (Bakic-Hayden and Hayden, 1992; Baker, 2018) and the nationalist sentiment within the constitutive republics often went counter to the Party’s programmatic slogan of ‘brotherhood and unity’. These strands of dehumanisation would converge towards the end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s turning the socialist state into an abyss that devoured thousands of lives and stripped generations of more promising futures. We keep this painful heritage of Yugoslavia’s cis-, heteronormative, and nationalist patriarchy16 in mind so that we can temper its captivating call at our time of pronounced dispossession, capitalist crisis, and insecurity. Even though its socialist appeal may mislead us into uncritical idealisations or even push us into politically unproductive romanticism, our invocations of Yugoslavia should not be dismissed as merely nostalgic: they go along the sobering lines of three recent region-wide grassroots declarations: on a common, polycentric language spoken in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia, on the necessity for a historical science resistant to revisionism, and on solidarity in dealing with common social and economic challenges.17 As we, equipped with these elementary values and premises, rummage through Yugoslavia’s ruins, we do not turn a blind eye to its numerous shadows, but we strive to rescue the most politically vital elements that have been trapped beneath the layers of vitriolic nationalisms and patriarchal authoritarianisms. We look for that indestructible core of decolonial, anti-racist, and anti-fascist togetherness because we urgently need it an ideological compass for navigating the murky waters of today’s politics: we would like to eventually turn it into a legacy that may be mobilised as a response to the stultifying toxicity of the present (Muñoz, 2009) and creatively (re)employed for generating new paradigms of inclusion. As this is our fourth collective LGBT-related book with a Yugoslav/ regional coverage, there is for us little doubt that ‘non-normative’ genders and sexualities have the potential (and perhaps also the responsibility) to replenish exhausted post-socialist imaginaries with new political content. Yugoslavia, even though it may not explicitly figure in them, serves as a backdrop for the ensuing chapters because it allows us to rely upon our own positionalities when (re)staging an encounter between gender diversity and socialism (Sernatinger and Echeverria, 2013). We separate emancipatory gestures from unfulfilled promises and revamped racisms by drawing the 9 Transgender in the Post-Yugoslav Space (post)socialist Yugoslav space through a queer–trans lens. In the course of this re-reading, which affords it feminist–queer–trans dimensions (largely missing from both its life and numerous fractured afterlives), Yugoslavia, an erased state, violently forgotten, is being resuscitated by many of its own erased: it thus acquires a new political charge and becomes legitimised as a political project on novel grounds. Such queer rearticulations of (post)socialist experience make it possible for us to challenge the silence that envelops socialist gender trajectories (Kancler, 2013) so that dissident gender practices of the past start living new lives.18 This does not only (re)connect us with the most progressive strands of transnational gender and sexual liberation19, but it also stimulates us to think about and act towards forging transformative alliances here and now. Making books, making ourselves Like with our previous volumes, with this one too we set out to rekindle the rebellious roar of feminism and help restore that mode of being in and with the world that celebrates belonging-in-difference (Muñoz, 2009, p 20), struggles to expand our possibilities, and revives our hopes depleted by long years of violence and destruction. As we have, over the last decade, moved across the alphabet of sexual and gender diversity arriving to the T with this book, we have also gone down a slope of political and material marginalisation addressing issues that directly concern an ever smaller number of people. While doing so, we have mobilised our feminist and queer shields to protect us from thinking that a quantitative descent may translate into a decrease of social relevance. On the contrary, we have enjoyed coming closer to an appreciation of the singularity of human experience and its capacity to persevere in spite of the funnelling function of authoritarian social structures. We have engaged with what still to a great extent are ‘nonnormative’ gender embodiments and sexual desires, approaching them not primarily as ‘identities’ in need of legal recognition/regulation but rather as spaces of disobedient feeling-thinking – repositories of disruptive knowledges of resistance and survival. Throughout this process we have often stumbled upon epistemological concerns about how that knowledge – that we produce and that produces us – is to be accumulated within and disseminated from our semi-peripheral space. When tackling this question we set out from the premise that in the context of global (academic) coloniality, the semi-periphery is not perceived (and consequently has a hard time perceiving itself) 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 (Blagojević, 2009). Such ‘cognitive irrelevance’ arises from the gaze of Western modernity pointed towards the semi-periphery as ‘its non-absolute other [with the 10 Introduction task of] homogenizing its multiplicity and diversity following the wellknown logic of either neglecting the other or misinterpreting it as the same’ (Tlostanova, 2014, p 1). The tendency of the core to shy away from and flatten the complexity of the semi-periphery instead of embracing the insights that it has to offer has had devastating consequences in our region in the period of transition from socialism to neoliberal capitalism: it prioritised fast implementations of external policy solutions inflating technical ‘expertise’ (rather than ‘knowledge’) of the local liberal cadres of translation at the expense of critical scholarship and activist research-based policies (Blagojević, 2009). While in the core countries knowledge production normally precedes policy making, in the semi-periphery, half-implemented, hybrid, and not entirely fitting policies run fast ahead of knowledge production because of the strong marginalisation of academia in general, and the critical social sciences in particular, and its frequent auto-colonial distance from its own social context (Blagojević, 2009). In other words, supposedly emancipatory impulses seep from the Western ‘centre’ into semi-peripheral publics and popular cultures ending up in routine revisions of legislation while only superficially penetrating the layers of social values reproducing along the way semi-periphery’s ‘semi-ness’ as a space that is simultaneously progressive and conservative. Within such hierarchised configurations, both social science scholars and activists from the semi-periphery are chained to the carousel of repetition, replication, and reproduction of the Western original (Blagojević, 2009). As they are rarely perceived as ‘creators’ of knowledge – a role reserved mostly for academics coming from the core – semi-peripheral scientists’ central function is that of translation/transmission of the knowledge that arrives from the centre (Blagojević, 2009; Clarke et al, 2015). Especially in the sphere of gender studies, which is in the focus of Blagojević’s interest, knowledge has been mostly imported from the West through an enormous amount of translation/transmission done by locally based scholars. This, as she claims, more mechanical and less creative way of knowledge communication from the core towards the semi-periphery, was a particularly rewarding activity for semi-peripheral scientists because it enabled direct contact with Western authors and power networks that could be approached in intelligible Western idioms to provide funding and assure reception and recognition. Bearing in mind that the post-Yugoslav space is an ambiguous part/non-part of the Western world – its abovementioned non-absolute Other – national and regional strategies of trans resistance are inspired by and draw upon larger transnational mobilisations stemming from the core while also taking specific local shapes. Therefore, our volume cannot purport to perform a radical departure from Western perspectives: an expectation that it could offer an ‘authentic’ trans or any ‘non-normative’ experience that would be 11 Transgender in the Post-Yugoslav Space free of Western vocabularies would probably constitute the highest form of its exoticisation. Accordingly, our book engages with Western knowledge production by paying attention to how global relationships of power shape the way in which trans discourses, practices, and knowledges travel, are translated, and materialise locally. We surely cannot escape colonial arrangements, but we have tried to come closer to the role of ‘creators’ by operating as ‘counter-transmitters’ and opening up a route along which knowledge would also flow in a reverse direction – from the semi-periphery to the core. A transgender studies perspective that both acknowledges the Anglo-American bias in much trans scholarship and unpacks the processes of knowledge and policy translation can shed a new light upon how gender difference is understood and practised in our region (Nord, 2013). In this regard, our book arises from a collaboration of both trans- and cisidentified researchers and activists who share the conviction that trans people are the primary carriers of knowledge about trans lives. In the local milieus in which strong patriarchal/hetero- and cis-normative currents traverse formal academic institutions, this embodied knowledge – as legitimate as any other – has consistently accrued within trans activist organisations, but it has been disseminated from them through still insufficiently acknowledged channels. Our collection approaches such groups, in which many of us participate, as epistemic communities and communities of praxis recognising that they have travelled far ahead of their official academic counterparts in terms of garnering trans-related knowledge. They have moved beyond mere ‘trans testimonies’ (Ashley, 2019) and engaged in developing a critical and analytical perspective vis-à-vis the dominant norms of medicine and entrenched social ideas about gender as a binary category. Thus, our book aims to start building an academic platform upon which such community-generated knowledge can be more systematically shaped to enter into and transform dominant academic discourses and mainstream gender-related policies and perceptions. Synchronised with the transnational movement for gender and sexual liberation, the ensuing chapters uncover alternative gender-related epistemologies seeking to put them to the service of social justice and enhance our collective sensitivity to the needs and demands of trans and non-binary people. Moreover, our own engagement over the years has embodied an effort to bring academia and activism into a politically productive symbiosis within which these two spheres – two nourishing vessels of feminism – can enrich each other and by doing so maximise the probability of taking our lives and our communities in more promising directions. When putting together this book, we repeatedly tried to weld the rage and passion of the activist with the composure and intellectual acuity of the scholar as we strove to increase the intelligibility of trans bodies by triggering and sustaining what Foucault (2003, p 7) called ‘the insurrection of subjugated knowledges’.20 According to him, the excavation of what has been historically occluded and pushed to the 12 Introduction margins of social legitimisation proceeds along two intertwined axes: the first one draws upon the traditional tools of scholarship and meticulous technical expertise to bring into the light of the day what has stayed hidden in the archives and other repositories of historical content; the second, on the other hand, delves into ‘singular local knowledges’ to recover ‘the raw memory of fights’ inscribed in the stamps that the power of disciplinary institutions has left on the minds and the bodies of those who have been silenced, discarded, and humiliated. Such genealogical pairing which breathes new life into both ‘the buried and the disqualified’, does not only begin to undo the discriminatory ‘hierarchy of erudition’ drawing the contours of a new, more just and inclusive academia, but it also helps us to devise activist strategies with which to articulate and respond to the pressing issues we face today. Our purpose, thus, is to contribute to transnational currents of transrelated knowledge through a series of experientially/empirically based, conjuncturally sensitive analyses about how trans liberation has been unfolding in the post-Yugoslav/post-socialist semi-periphery in three major intertwined domains: lives, activisms, and culture. The first part (Lives) brings four contributions based either on authors’ personal trans experiences or on long-term ethnographic work in trans communities. This section explores the challenges that trans people have encountered through the process of becoming more visible in public arenas across the post-Yugoslav space. The second part (Activisms) examines histories and politics of trans activist organising emphasising the strategies through which the T has increasingly come to assume its proper place within LGBT initiatives. Contributions to this section operate both diachronically and synchronically positioning trans engagement in the history of regional feminist and non-heterosexual activist endeavours while also critically engaging with contemporary tensions and conflicts within leftist activist groups. The third part (Culture) brings innovative contributions about the ways in which gender non-normativity has been represented in (post-)Yugoslav popular culture as well as about how artistic endeavours have been employed as activist instruments. These three sections taken together offer a unique entry point into the post-Yugoslav and Eastern European trans landscape and constitute a solid basis for further research in this underexplored area. Finally, we believe that it is high time that our space, which has been for so long subjected to the oppressive canon of nationalist politics, broke that stranglehold and embraced a heteroglossic diversity of gender embodiments and experiences. Therefore, this book, like its predecessors within our collective, is not supposed to constitute only a gathering point of already established authors: more broadly and more ambitiously, it purports to shape disparate strands of both existing and potential trans-related scholarship into a new field of regional queer- and trans-led queer/trans studies that can exist alongside and hybridise with global threads of activist engagement and 13 Transgender in the Post-Yugoslav Space scholarly production on an equal footing. We hope that our piece in the transnational mosaic of trans emancipation will sharpen the tools we use to celebrate trans vitality and bring about life-affirming social change. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 The petition Against Transphobia, published on 21 December 2020, is available here: https:// transserbia.org/vesti/1781-protiv-transfobije This letter is available here: https://marks21.info/pismo-podrske-centru-za-zenske-stud ije-u-zagrebu/ This polysemic ‘we’ refers primarily to us as three co-editors with our different positions within the field of Yugoslav studies and LGBT activist scholarship. All three of us – Bojan is a sociologist of the (post-)Yugoslav anti-war, feminist, and LGBT movement(s) while Iwo and Aleksa are trans scholars and activists – have been committed both to bridging the gap between academia and activism as well as to reigniting the queer dimension of regional activist endeavours by expanding their intersectional (and especially class-related) sensitivity. Throughout the introduction, this ‘we’ also often encompasses our authors and stretches towards those who would still today identify as Yugoslavs: ‘This “we” does not speak to a merely identitarian logic but instead to a logic of futurity. The “we” speaks to a “we” that is “not yet conscious”, the future society that is being invoked and addressed at the same moment. The “we” is not content to describe who the collective is but more nearly describes what the collective and the larger social order could be, what it should be’ (Muñoz, 2009, p 20). For example, the petition that the three of us signed mentions a ‘handful’ (šačica) of transphobic activists. Not only is this word imbued with negative connotations associated with the 1990s when the regime of Slobodan Milošević used it to discredit its opponents (for example, Istinomer, 2011) and belittle their resistance, but it also draws upon the right-wing idea, frequently mobilised against the LGBT population, that numerical figures directly translate into political relevance. In this regard, one of the crucial questions within our wider political project of queering the post-Yugoslav space is how to liberate progressive threads of thought (and) action from the reactionary discourses with which they have become entangled. For a chapter about bisexual life and activism that appeared within our collective, see Hura (2016). Marija Draškić, professor at the University of Belgrade Law School, was a forerunner of legal analysis of the relationship between transsexuality and marriage in Serbia. See Draškić (1994). Nevertheless, according to Binnie and Klesse (2012, p 445) ‘the term LGBTQ signifies a coalitional practice between different collectivities of actors. The term is controversial because it insinuates a quasi-natural confluence of interests around certain gender and/ or sexual subjectivities’. Agatha Milan Đurić states that there was an initiative to give more space to transgender people at the first Belgrade Pride in 2001. However, this idea was not favourably received by other activist currents, especially lesbian ones, that took part in the organisation of the event (Transserbia.org, 2022). See also Đurić, this volume. In the late 1980s, the Croatian philosopher Milan Polić (1988) published a text in the women’s magazine Žena discussing the potential of transsexuality to transform gender binaries and destabilise patriarchal gender regimes. See also Krznar (2021) and Rogoznica (2011). Trans is not the only issue that has gone through this process in our collective work over the last ten years. Lesbian activist engagement, for example, had a similar footnote 14 Introduction 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 (Bilić, 2012b) to chapter (Mlađenović, 2012; Mlađenović, 2016) to volume (Bilić and Radoman, 2019) to monograph (Bilić, 2020) trajectory. The ‘trans path’ is continued by Nord’s doctoral research, which explores Belgrade as an important but insufficiently visible node in the web of transnational migrations organised around gender confirmation surgeries (see also Rakić et al, 1993; Nord, 2019). Quijano (2000, 2007) claimed that Eurocentred capitalist power functions on the global scale along two main axes: ‘the coloniality of power’ and ‘modernity’. The entanglement between race and gender comes to the fore in a particularly poignant manner in the speech of Sojourner Truth, a former slave turned abolitionist and women’s rights activist, subsequently entitled ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ ‘Western Balkans’ refers to the former Yugoslav space while excluding Slovenia and including Albania. Rexhepi (2018) argues that some critical attempts to question these configurations, underscore Europe’s orientalising of the Balkans while claiming that it is ‘predominantly Christian’ and without any ‘colonial legacies’. Muñoz (2009, p 29) argues that ‘the transregional or the global as modes of spatial organization potentially displace the hegemony of an unnamed here that is always dominated by the shadow of the nation-state and its mutable and multiple corporate interests’. In his text on queer regionality, Binnie (2016) also claims that a critical regional lens on LGBT politics may uncover sub-national and transnational political formations that can be occluded by a focus on the national scale. See in this regard how Milan Agatha Đurić writes about their experience of growing up in the 1980s’ Yugoslavia (Đurić, this volume). The Declaration on the Common Language (Deklaracija o zajedničkom jeziku) was issued in 2017, the declaration Defend History (Odbranimo istoriju) in 2020, and the Declaration on Regional Solidarity (Deklaracija o regionalnoj solidarnosti) also in 2020. Within this framework we can understand how today’s Slovenian transgender movement recovers Ljuba Prenner, a Yugoslav/Slovenian lawyer assigned female at birth, who stated that it was thanks to socialist advances in the sphere of gender that he could start donning men’s clothes in the wake of the Second World War (Pirnar, 2006). 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