Post-Yugoslav Negotiations of Queer
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
SUBVERSIVE VISUALITY BETWEEN ART AND ACTIVISM: POST-YUGOSLAV NEGOTIATIONS OF QUEER ART By Sanja Kajinić Submitted to Central European University Department of Gender Studies In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in Comparative Gender Studies Supervisor: Professor Erzsebet Barat Budapest, Hungary CEU eTD Collection 2013 DECLARATION I hereby declare that no parts of this thesis have been submitted towards a degree at any other institution apart from the CEU nor, to my knowledge, does the thesis contain unreferenced material or ideas from other authors. All pictures displayed in this thesis are used strictly for academic, non-commercial purposes, and I do not claim any authorship of them. Sanja Kajinić CEU eTD Collection i COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright in the text of this dissertation rests with the author. Copies by any process, either full or in part, may be made only in accordance with the instructions given by the author and lodged in the Library of the Central European University. Details may be obtained from the librarian. This page must form a part of any such copies made. Further copies made in accordance with such instructions may not be made without the permission of the author. Sanja Kajinić CEU eTD Collection ii ABSTRACT In this project, I study the processes of negotiation of meanings of queerness in art works, visuality and space of post-Yugoslav queer festivals. The thesis researches how LGBT/queer art festivals (and in particular the Queer Zagreb Festival in Croatia) used queer visuality in the post-Yugoslav region from 2003 till 2012. This research engages with discussions in the fields of feminist visual studies, cultural studies, queer theory, festival studies, and (queer) anthropology to ask about the influence of visual representation on social changes. Methodologically, my dissertation combines the ethnography of the Queer Zagreb Festival with interview analysis, and close-reading of written and visual Festival materials. Furthermore, my analysis is informed by the concerns of feminist intersectionality and queer approaches to ethnography. I show that while the visuality of the Queer Zagreb Festival aimed for a radical queering of the Croatian public discourses of art and politics, it was framed through the programming of the Festival as the time-space where high art and avant-garde influences meet popular culture. I argue that the practices of regional negotiation of queerness oscillate between the strategies of queering belonging and visuality (of queering the region, art works and identities), and the strategies of creating queer visual representation (of choosing to produce queer/lesbian/gay region, art works and identities). CEU eTD Collection Approaching negotiation as both material and discursive, I explore the ways in which, in particular, the Zagreb festival community negotiates regional queerness through travelling, experiencing festival time-space, and understanding art. I suggest that the post-Yugoslav queer festivals (despite significant differences in artistic and iii political goals among them) are all engaged in practices of claiming the public space for the display of art works that question sexual and gender normativity. I argue that the opening up of festival chronotopes to non-normative visuality creates temporary free festival spaces of queer sociability. The significance of my project for a broader audience lies in my suggestion that the subversive lesbian and gay and/or queer representations can be read as an index of larger changes in post-socialist sexual and gender hierarchies. CEU eTD Collection iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My deep gratitude goes to everybody who helped and was a fellow on this journey: All the activists, artists, organizers and friends who had talked to me in Zagreb, Ljubljana, Belgrade and Sarajevo, My supervisor Erzsebet Barat, Kaja Zapedowska, Dorota Golanska, and Elzbieta Oleksy of the Women’s Studies Center in Lodz; Rosemarie Buikema of the 2007 NOISE in Bologna; Rozita Dimova, Antke Engel, and Sarah Green of the EastBordNet project, All the professors, colleagues (including Carine Middel) and staff members at the CEU Gender department, and especially to Agnes and Dori of my Phd Support Group, and to Sonia; to Tijana Krstić, my BCS students, and the colleagues at the CEU Source Language Teaching Group: To the 2012/2013 GenderQueer Labor at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt; to Christa Haemmerle of the Institute for History at the University of Vienna; To Marion Kuecholl, and my sister Maja; To my stepfather Anto, to Mile, and to my brother Toni; to my cousin Steffy Pop, To Bojan Bilić, to Maja Pan and her herr Migu, To the Farkas-Carnaffans, To deda Luka and his question “sine, is that thing of yours over yet?”, CEU eTD Collection To the Milicas – Cartina Kartich and my mom Danica, To Hela and the herd, And last but not least, to Szokoli Musztafa of the 16th century Buda, and to santa Agata di Catania. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Contents DECLARATION .......................................................................................................... i COPYRIGHT NOTICE ................................................................................................ ii ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................... v TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................ vi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ..................................................................................... viii INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1 1 SITUATED SUBVERSION: STAGING REGIONAL QUEERNESS ...................... 12 1.1 Imagining Regional Queerness While Queering the Region .....................................13 1.2 How Post-Yugoslav Arts Festivals Translate “Queer” ...............................................18 1.2.1 Symbolic Geographies ....................................................................................... 18 1.2.2 The Politics of Naming ....................................................................................... 21 1.3 Post-Yugoslav Queer Festivals' Chronotopes ............................................................25 1.4 The Carnivalesque of Queer Festival Heterotopias ....................................................36 2 REGIONAL QUEERNESS: VISIBILITY POLITICS AND QUEERING REPRESENTATION................................................................................................. 44 2.1 What Queer Images Want: Visibility and Visuality of Resistance .............................46 2.2 LGBT Transformative Collectives through Visibility Politics ....................................53 2.3 Queer Seeability ...........................................................................................................61 2.3.1 Queering Visuality and Practices of Curating ................................................. 62 2.3.2 Queering Visuality and Art ................................................................................ 69 2.3.3 Queering Visuality and Festival Images .......................................................... 78 CEU eTD Collection 3 METHODOLOGICAL ROAD-GUIDE: RESEARCH PROCESS AND ITS MANY CHANGES ................................................................................................................ 82 3.1 An Interface: Research Methodology and Theoretical Questions .............................84 3.2 Critical Visual Methodology and the Metaphor of a Queer Archive ..........................89 3.3 Thinking about Queering Methodology ......................................................................92 4 CULTIVATING QUEER ART IN ZAGREB: FESTIVAL MANIFESTOS ................ 95 vi 4.1 Organizing Queer Festival in Manifestos ....................................................................98 4.1.1 Festival Manifestos “Defining” (Regionally) Queer Art .................................. 99 4.1.2 Festival Manifestos Testing the Mainstream ................................................. 103 4.1.3 Open(ing) Festival Manifestos ........................................................................ 106 4.2 Textualizing Queer Zagreb Chronotopes .................................................................. 109 4.2.1 Chronotope of Regional Queerness ............................................................... 110 4.2.2 Chronotopes of Intersection of Art and Activism ......................................... 113 4.2.3 Chronotope of Resistance ............................................................................... 120 4.3 “Inventing” the Audience, Inviting the Transnational Art World ............................. 122 4.3.1 Audience in Festival Manifestos ..................................................................... 123 4.3.2 Festival Circuit in Manifestos .......................................................................... 125 4.3.3 Institutional Field in Manifestos ...................................................................... 126 5 SUBVERTING THE CROATIAN MAINSTREAM: FESTIVAL PROGRAMS ...... 129 5.1 Negotiating the Queer Program ................................................................................. 130 5.1.1 Strategy of Queering (High) Art .....................................................................