Happily Sick: Trauma, Nation, and Queer Affect

Abstract

Yugoslavia’s rich cinematic tradition rarely tackled the themes of queer desire overtly, perhaps mirroring the overarching lack of public discourses on such topics in a country in which homosexuality in some republics remained illegal well into the 1990s. If and when the themes of homoerotic desire appeared—for instance, in Srđan Karanović’s Virdžina (1991) or Živko Nikolić’s The Beauty of Sin (1986)—their representations of queer subjectivities typically veered toward a more figurative use of its subversive potential, most notably toward critiquing patriarchal traditions of a “backward” region such as the Balkans. Queerness was therefore inevitably linked to subversive or transgressive tendencies, pitted in a binary opposition to an inherently reactionary heterosexuality. Moreover, these approaches, as instances of critically reflexive self-Balkanization, were at times overt attempts at linking traditional patriarchal, heteronormative rule to nationalist tendencies. Yet, what remained out of reach in such frameworks is a consideration of queer desire outside of the binary framework that has to perpetually pit it against heteronormativity in order to position it as visible or readable (Jelača 2012). In the years following the violent Yugoslav conflict, there has been an increasing number of films that tackle the topics of non-conforming sexualities and gender identities, a cultural turn which is linked to the increasing efforts of the regional LGBTQ groups to achieve greater rights and public acceptance for persons of non-normative gender identity and sexual orientation.