LGBT Activism and Europeanisation in the Post-Yugoslav Space, 1st ed. 2016 On the Rainbow Way to Europe Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology Series

Europe and the European Union are unavoidable,  if ambiguous, political references in the post-Yugoslav space. This volume interrogates the forms and implications of the increasingly potent symbolic nexus that has developed between non-heterosexual sexualities, LGBT activism(s) and Europeanisation(s) in all of the Yugoslav successor states.

Contributors to this book show how the long EU accession process disseminates discursive tools employed in LGBT activist struggles for human rights and equality. This creates a linkage between ?Europeanness? and ?gay emancipation? which elevates certain forms of gay activist engagement and perhaps also non-heterosexuality, more generally, to a measure of democracy, progress and modernity. At the same time, it relegates practices of intolerance to the LGBT community to the status of non-European primitivist Other who is inevitably positioned in the patriarchal past that should be left behind.  

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1. Europeanisation, LGBT Activism, and Non-Heteronormativity in the Post-Yugoslav Space: An Introduction; Bojan Bilić.- 2. Discontents of Professionalisation: Sexual Politics and Activism in Croatia in the Context of EU Accession; Nicole Butterfield.- 3. The First European Festival of Lesbian and Gay Film Was Yugoslav: Dismantling the Geotemporality of Europeanisation in Slovenia; Sanja Kajinić.- 4. Growing Oppression, Growing Resistance: LGBT Activism and Europeanisation in Macedonia; Ana Miškovska Kajevska.- 5. Europe © Gays?:Europeanisation and Pride Parades in Serbia; Bojan Bilić.- 6. Queering as Europeanisation, Europeanisation as Queering: Challenging Homophobia in Everyday Life in Montenegro; Danijel Kalezić and Čarna Brković.- 7. From Orientalism to Homonationalism: Queer Politics, Islamophobia and Europeanisation in Kosovo.- 8. From Orientalism to Homonationalism: Queer Politics, Islamophobia and Europeanisation in Kosovo; Piro Rexhepi.- 9. On the Other Side of an Ethnocratic State?: LGBT Activism in Post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina; Adelita Selmić.- 10.  Beyond EUtopian Promises and Disillusions: A Conclusion; Bojan Bilić and Paul Stubbs.

Bojan Bilić is Marie Curie Fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is the author of We Were Gasping for Air: (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War Activism and Its Legacy (2012) and co-editor of Resisting the Evil: (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War Contention (2012) and Intersectionality and LGBT Activist Politics: Multiple Others in Croatia and Serbia (2016).

This volume redresses the imbalance between Western and Eastern European research on LGBT activism.

A richly interdisciplinary collection combining EU studies, political and social movements, and gender and LGBT studies.

Includes both academic and activists’ voices and thus goes beyond the divisory line that has been long separating these two communities.