Enacting New Alliances in the Balkans: Queerness, Class and Politics // Balkan Open || 12th May 2013
Channel: SkriptaTV
Date: 31/05/2013

Panelists: Artan Sadiku (Coalition "Sexual and Health Rights of Marginalized Communities", Macedonia), Gordan Bosanac (Domino -- Queer Zagreb, Croatia), Dušan Maljković (Centre for Queer Studies, Serbia)

Chair: Karla Horvat Crnogaj (Domino -- Queer Zagreb, Hrvatska)

Paralell sessions II

Hall III: Enacting New Alliances in the Balkans: Queerness, Class and Politics

12/05/2013, 12:00h, ZKM 6th Subversive Festival, 2nd Balkan Forum, Balkan Open

In the last fifteen years we have witnessed an increasingly visible and articulated movement for the rights of LGBT people on the entire Balkans. Various activist forms for emancipations of LGBT minorities such as pride parades or queer festivals (as well as attempts at organizing them) have strongly marked the post-war context of Balkan countries. The LGBT movement has primarily relied on well-established methods and strategies of action initiated by human rights associations and other organizations that were active in the democratization of the countries formed after the war. On the other hand, emancipation of LGBT people, if achieved in the manner of "given" rights, completely supports the neoliberal system of action and produces reactionary conservative effects visible in the emergence of homonationalism (uncritical support of nation-state ideology and education of a „gay nation") and the so-called pink washing („washing" of problematic state policies such as racism and classism -- through the support of LGBT rights). Nothing keeps, let us say, a multinational companiy that violates the rights of other marginalized groups from hiring an LGBT person and acknowledging "gay marriage" through its rules of procedure (meaning the complete abolishment of formal discriminatory practices) and in this way "emancipate/integrate" the LGBT minority. The question remains whether the Balkan LGBT movement is heading in that direction (inspired by similar processes in liberal democracies) or LGBT emancipation is opening a new space for class struggle. This panel discusses the potential and capital of Balkan LGBT movements for such processes.

In cooperation with Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

http://www.subversivefestival.com/foruml/7/252/en/paralell-sessions-II