Queer migrations: gender(ed) identities and belonging in the cinema of Serbia and Greece

Abstract

The thesis will study with the representations of queer desire and Westward transnational mobility as they appear in the cinemas of Serbia and Greece. Against the historical background of the post-socialist transformations in the Balkans, the political upheavals and the transition to neoliberal structures of nation-states, reconfigured with cross-border flows of capital and human mobilities, the paper aims to trace how narratives of queer intimacies are fused together with migrants’ sense of precarity and search of belonging between borders and within geopolitical locations. Do these queer representations question, disrupt and/or (de)stabilize the cultural-political meanings of the modern heteronational identity? Queer cinema will be the ethnographic fieldwork for the research question and more specifically Serbian and Greek films from 1995 to 2005 to contextualize the analysis around the ways the films engage with the theoretical and political shifts that mark the decade in the transitional post-Yugoslav era, with the formation of capitalist ethno-national “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1999). They will allow me to find connections and contradictions in the cinemas of a post-socialist country and the one nation in the Balkans not to fall under communist control and examine how they employ the queer figure and acknowledge queer desire, migration and the cinematic border crossing both in narrative and in production. Therefore, building on LGBTQ+ and migration scholarship, queerness and migration scholarship will be the vehicles to theorize borders –geographical and political, but also sexual boundaries- and address hierarchies including gender, sex and nation in their journeys of queer (im)mobility.