Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how drag performers in late postsocialist Belgrade refashion memories of socialist Yugoslavia to create queer and trans futurities that challenge the realities of life in the postsocialist transition, drawing on examples of drag performers and events in contemporary Belgrade.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how drag performers in late postsocialist Belgrade refashion memories of socialist Yugoslavia to create queer and trans futurities that challenge the realities of life in the postsocialist transition. Over the last seven years, the drag community in Belgrade has grown significantly, with many performers creating drag identities that directly reference aspects of the socio-political history of Serbia and the Balkans region more broadly. In particular, despite having limited lived experience of socialist Yugoslavia, some drag queens have been inspired by the former country, integrating its anti-fascist ideology into their performances and borrowing elements of the former country’s visual lexicon in their costumes. Performers directly contrast contemporary Serbia’s authoritarian, homophobic and transphobic political landscape with a framing of Yugoslav identity as emancipatory. Drawing on examples of drag performers and events in Belgrade – Gospoda Pereca, Novoslovenka and Dragoslavia – I argue that drag performers act as ghosts of socialist pasts, disrupting teleological views of recent history and presenting an alternative, queer perspective of the postsocialist transition. In this way, memories of Yugoslavia become a powerful tool for fabulating and imagining alternative futures, which actively work against the colonial underpinnings of a normative reading of Serbia’s transition as failed. In doing so, I build both on scholarship that connects Yugoslavia to ideas of queer utopia (Dioli 2009), as well as that which points to the potential of the postsocialist transition as a form of queer temporality and futurity (Blagojević and Timotijević 2018).