Abstract

This project draws on the memories and life stories of six post-Yugoslav queer migrants - Nika, Senka, Leon, Bojan, Mato, and Željko - to offer insight into the interplay between the affective legacies of the Yugoslav socialist project, their sexual and gender identities, and their political imagination. I investigate how the migration trajectories of my research participants intersect with Western neoliberal ideologies and global constructions of sexual and gender identities, such as being “out” or celebrating pride. Using oral history as a method, I draw on their life stories to map the dissonances between their discursive and embodied experiences that were prompted by their movements across nation-state borders and communities. In doing so, I interrogate the linearity of developmental queer narratives of progress and homonormativity. Examining political imagination and sexual politics across various geopolitical-temporal and historical contexts, my research contests representations of the West as a place of progress and liberation.
Exploring themes of nostalgia, disillusionment, belonging, identity formation, and political visions of the world, I offer an interpretative analysis of the life stories and reflections shared by my interlocutors. Through this project, I formed a set of relationships of transnational queer diaspora that complicates and challenges both the memory of Yugoslavia and the image of the West as a place of progress and refuge for minoritarian subjects and I investigate whether reclaimed or shared memories resist official national histories to highlight how the nation-state framework constricts and regulates political imaginaries.