Abstracts der Vorträge

Jelena Savić: Lorde in Serbia: (Re)conceptualizing American and Mahala Blackness in the Semi-Periphery (29.10.2024)

Vortrag in englischer Sprache

Abstract
In this talk I engage with the concept of blackness within the semi-peripheral context of Serbian feminism. Drawing on my experiences as a Roma feminist of over two decades and the results of desk research tracking the digital traces of the Audre Lorde’s work as a representative of American feminism, I propose a conceptualization of blackness in geopolitical terms. I view semi-peripheral context as both validating American —and thereby Western—imperial blackness, and as being part of the European white enclosure, which subjugates it through familiar processes of mastering, whitewashing, and symbolic “negroization”. In comparison to empty and tokenized but nevertheless legitimate and inspirational, American feminist blackness, the racialized “gypsified” Roma subjectivity is relegated behind semi-peripheral margin into the mahala, a color line marked by inferior Roma mahala-blackness, characterized as a place of permanent crisis, inviting the semi-peripheral feminist civilizing mission. Resistance to the masterful readings of American and Roma mahala-blackness will be illustrated through the recording of my performance “Little Sister Outsider”, presentation at the launch of the Serbian translation of Lorde’s book “ZAMI:  A New Spelling of My Name” held in Belgrade in 2022 with the support of the informal platform “Black Sheep Academy”.

About the speaker
Jelena Savic is a PhD candidate at Uppsala University's Centre for Gender Research, specializing in the intersection of Critical Digital Humanities and Critical Romany Studies. Her research draws from theories of whiteness, decolonialism, and critical race theory. With an MA in Philosophy from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, she has a background in dehumanization studies at the intersection of scientific racism, sexism, and speciesism. Jelena also graduated from the Department of Andragogy at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, Serbia. Being of Serbian Roma origin, Jelena has been engaged in Roma and feminist movements for two decades. In 2019 she contributed a chapter to the Routledge publication "The Romani Women’s Movement: Struggles and Debates in Central and Eastern Europe”.

Piro Rexhepi: A Yugoslav Woman in Teheran: Nonaligned Muslims in the Margins of Socialism (12.11.2024)

Vortrag in englischer Sprache

Abstract 
On March 23, 1983, Yugoslav security forces raided Melika Salihbegović's (1945–2017) apartment Albanska Street in Sarajevo to find the personal letter she had written to Ayatollah Khomeini asking for permission to move to Iran. Together with 13 other Muslim activists she would be sentenced to prison in 1983 for revolutionary activities against the state in what came to be known as the 'Sarajevo trials' which instigated the beginning of state sponsored attack on Muslim communities in Yugoslavia that would later result in the Bosnian genocide. Through a reading of Salihbegovićs' life, this presentation aims to illustrate how subterranean and subversive movements with itineraries and imaginaries that exceeded the capitalist-socialist binding Cold War ‘choices’ sought to rehabilitate from the colonial damage and transcend the modern/colonial matrix.

About the speaker
Piro Rexhepi is a research fellow at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at UCL. He is the author of White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality along the Balkan Route (Duke University Press, 2023). 

Dušan Maljković: Semiperipheral Homonationalisms.The Unfulfilled Promise of Ana Brnabić (26.11.2024)

Vortrag in englischer Sprache

Abstract
Ana Brnabić has been the first openly lesbian prime minister of Serbia for the past eight years and the first in the world to hold this position while having a wife and a child. Although this can be perceived as a revolutionary milestone in both regional and global advancements for LGBT+ rights, it is important to examine the actual impact she had on the advancement queer human rights in Serbia. Despite the state's formal displays of tolerance and acceptance, her legacy on a social level is ambivalent. While it promised radical change, this potential was generally not fulfilled.

About the speaker
Dušan Maljković is a PhD candidate in philosophy of psychoanalysis and coordinator of the Center for Queer Studies in Belgrade, Serbia.

Jelena Vidić: Working as an LGBT Affirmative Psychotherapist in Belgrade: Experiences, Challenges, Reflections (10.12.2024)

Vortrag in englischer Sprache

Abstract
Psychology and psychotherapy in Serbia, a semiperipheral country transitioning towards liberal capitalism, have been exposed to significant changes in terms of the conceptualisation of gender and sexuality. Despite the many benefits of socialism, especially regarding women`s rights, Serbian society remained mainly conservative and patriarchal. Since the 1990s Serbia has been going through the process of retraditionalization and in the past years this trend is emphasized in the development of the local branches of the anti-gender movement. At the same time, the dominant currents in psychology have been conceptualizing sexual and gender variance in a non-pathological way (non-normative sexual orientation since 1972 (DSM-II-rev)/1990 (ICD/10)), and transgender identity in 2013 (DSM-V)/2019 (ICD-11)). By some mental health professionals LGBTIQ affirmative approaches have been regarded as the elements of the gender ideology imported from the West aiming to colonise the country and destroy its traditional family values. At the same time LGBTIQ affirmative psychologists and psychotherapists are providing support to the community members either through LGBTIQ NGOs or in private practice. In this lecture I will offer a brief overview of the situation in Serbia and share my experiences with providing LGBTIQ affirmative care within a NGO and private practice.

About the speaker
Jelena Vidić is a psychologist and psychotherapist living in Belgrade, Serbia. She is an assistant professor at the Department of Psychology of the Singidunum University in Belgrade and works as an individual and group psychotherapist in private practice. Her work is grounded in feminist and affirmative approaches.

Tanja Petrović: Of Men, Feelings, and Forms: The Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army (21.01.2025)

Vortrag in englischer Sprache

Abstract
The lecture explores the meanings of the mandatory service in the Yugoslav People’s Army and seeks to offer insights into this collective experience that escape the “large” categories of (militarised) masculinity, violence, patriarchy, and complicate the understanding of the socialist military service as the hegemonic work of the autocratic state to which oppressed individuals are subjected. It focuses in particular on the power of repetitive, ritualised, and performative forms that constituted the reality of military service, provided a framework for radically different men to live together on military bases, and were capable of generating feelings of solidarity, care, love, and friendship among these men. In their afterlife, these feelings disrupt the givenness of the present and its relation towards the past and the future, prompting us to ask important questions about the ways in which we understand, remember and historicise the Yugoslav socialist project and the violence in which Yugoslavia disintegrated.   

About the speaker
Tanja Petrović is a principal research associate at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana. She is interested in the uses and meanings of socialist and Yugoslav legacies in post-Yugoslav societies, as well as in cultural, linguistic, political, and social processes that shape the reality of these societies. She is the author and editor of several books and a number of articles and essays in the fields of anthropology of post-socialism, memory studies, masculinity, gender history, heritage studies, linguistic anthropology, and labour history. Among them are Yuropa: Jugoslovensko nasleđe i politike budućnosti u postjugoslovenskim društvima (Yuropa: Yugoslav Legacy and Politics of Future in Post-Yugoslav Societies, Fabrika knjiga 2012; German translation published by Verbrecher Verlag in 2015), an edited volume Mirroring Europe: Ideas of Europe in Europeanization in Balkan Societies (Brill Publishing 2014), Srbija i njen jug: Južnjački dijalekti između jezika, kulture i politike (Serbia and its South: Southern Dialects between Language, Culture and Politics, Fabrika knjiga 2015), as well as Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People’s Army (Duke University Press 2024).

The whole book available here: Utopia of the UniformAffective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army | Books Gateway | Duke University Press (dukeupress.edu)