Paper short abstract:

This paper explores ‘the politics of sentimentality’ and ‘the politics of dwelling’ with specific reference to the documentary film SICK which represents the traumatic narrative of a young lesbian woman who was confined in a psychiatric hospital in Croatia and ‘treated’ for her homosexuality.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores 'the politics of sentimentality' in articulation to 'the politics of dwelling' with specific reference to the documentary film SICK which represents the narrative of a young lesbian woman, Ana, who was confined in a psychiatric hospital in Croatia and 'treated' for her homosexuality. In Croatia, during the last two decades, different narratives about suffering flourish in media. These narratives, as Sara Ahmed argues, even though described as a private experience, are 'evoked in public discourse as that which demands a collective as well as individual response' (2004: 20). They are designed to make viewers to be more empathic and compassionate to suffering of others, but this empathy and compassion are not neutral as it seems at the first glance - 'they are crucial to the very constitution of the psychic and the social as objects' to 'I' and 'we' (Ahmed 2004: 10). Following Ahmed, in this paper we analyse Ana's narrative, as it has been represented in SICK, as a part of the big network of projects that put on display personal stories of suffering that mobilize viewers emotional identifications with the embodied agents of pain and suffering, and we analyse how these identifications are linked to the processes of nation building and politics of dwelling.

Hence, we don't discuss representation of Ana's personal narrative as isolated from the culture and context within which the film emerged; rather, we explore how representation of Ana's narrative traverses the different forms of national imaginary of dwelling in contemporary Croatia.