Homophobia in contemporary Post-Yugoslav Societies
Focus: Collectivity vs. Individuality/Culture and conflict
My PhD thesis deals with implications and dynamics of social change and cultural conflicts in contemporary Post-Yugoslav societies. Handling with homosexuality cuts a deep cleft through former Yugoslavia. Therefore exists the urging need of explanation, how we could understand the function of homo-phobia as group based form of hostility in the culture of South-Eastern Europe, but not only there.
Homophobic attitudes and high degree of acceptance of dis-crimination towards LGBT-people are currently representing one of the most important issues of concern. Visible sexual minorities are in public space provoking the anger of the as-sumed majority, as violence in Belgrade 2001/2010, Sarajevo 2008 and Split 2011 evidenced. Sexual minorities are culturally and spatially constructed as the “others“, whose have to be banned from the publicity as forum for collectivity to privacy. One may conclude that homosexuality does not correspond with collective national values and does not belong to patterns of “normal” everyday live.
Culture and Public Space/Cultural memory
Hate Speech, for instance from right-wing or clerical movements, and general discrimination are in a heteronormative framework linked to the narrative, that homosexuality is not only compared to sickness and morbidity, it is challenging the morality and norms of the majority. Homophobia intersects concepts and fields of gender, sexuality, religion, nation, class, age, ethnicity and location. Differing perceptions of gender, sexuality and diverstity are entering in a conflict of values in the contemporary Balkans. Homosexuality is frequently treated as something alien or strange, which is implemented from outside (western world) and not consistent with cultural memory or national myths. Heroic and Hegemonic Masculinity [Connell 1999] constructs in alliance with the production of the Heterosexual Matrix [Butler 1991] a symbolic distance to non-heterosexual identities. Visible queer identities are at the same time victims of hate speech in public debates
and everyday discourse, which could be understood as an discursive effect of the Heterosexual Matrix. Excluded from public sphere, deviant sexuality may not become visible and is only tolerated in the privacy of one´s home.
On the other hand the global gay rights movement effects Post-Yugoslav states in a way, where after the democratic change in Serbia and the end of the Tuđman-era in Croatia, sexual minorities are getting more and more visible and confident to ask for their human and civil rights. My comparative PhD thesis deals with following questions: How can the high degree of homophobia be sociologically explained? Which differences and/or similarities do exist between Post-Yugoslav societies themselves, with reference to concepts of gender, sexuality, religion, nation, class, age, ethnicity and location? Which differences and/or similarities do exist between Post-Yugoslav societies and Western Europe? Are western complains on Homophobia in the Balkans perceived as something, what Maria Todorova catched into her concept of Balkanism?
Relevance of the project and methodological implications
The outcomes of my research will be a comparative dispositive-study [Foucault 1978] on homophobia in contemporary Post-Yugoslav societies and to get some answers on Globalization, Europeanization and Politics of Cultural Difference. Homo-phobia in the Balkans is often complained by European and international organizations, for instance in annual progress re-ports of the European Commission. Candidate countries and potential candidates like Croatia, BiH or Serbia are facing criti-cism by the western world, even though homophobia does not represent a specific problem of the Balkans. Rather a global one, as one could see in France, Italy, Russia, Ireland, Poland, Uganda or the US.
The general aim of my project is to explain sociologically and historically the high degree of homophobia in the recent past. To answer the purpose I will analyze the Post-Yugoslav disposi-tive in two ways: First in an event-oriented dispositive-analysis of mass media (newspapers/TV), legal texts, schoolbooks, par-liament debates on same-sex marriage or partnership and com-mercials in the space of time from 2001 to 2014. Secondly: I will additionally hold problem-centered interviews (about 20), to contrast these data of subjective views in the sphere of everyday life with the findings which I will hopefully get out of the first part of the analysis.