arna Brkovi

Queering Montenegro:
Challenging Homophobia in Montenegro
This talk discusses the LGBTIQ activism in Montenegro, focusing on how it has been shaped by
complex relationships between the NGOs, the state, international donors, the EU, and everyday
forms of oppression. Montenegrin LGBTIQ activists have invested a lot of effort to teach the state
institutions, such as the police, healthcare, or justice system, how to do their job in order to
ensure the basic conditions for providing physical safety of the LGBTIQ people. In doing so, the
activists were faced with a particular set of everyday, personal problems, which affected their
wellbeing and intimate relationships with other people in their lives. While highly successful
according to a specific set of parameters, such efforts could not disturb the historically forged
conceptual link between Europe and homosexuality, which places non-heterosexual practices
and people outside of the Montenegrin polity. The chapter discusses possible directions of the
LGBTIQ activism which could reposition minority sexual practices as constitutive of the political
and social life in Montenegro.
ARNA BRKOVI is a social anthropologist exploring politics of survival and wellbeing, public
spheres, and clientelism in former Yugoslav countries. After obtaining a PhD (University of
Manchester, 2012), she held Postdoctoral Fellowships at the CEU Institute for Advanced Study
(2013/14) and New Europe College, Institute for Advanced Studies (2014/2015). She is co-editing
a book Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Ashgate, forthcoming, with Stef
Jansen and Vanja elebii).

Thursday, March 12, 2015, 15:30-17:00

REC JK [Valckenierstraat 65-67], Room B.25
The lecture is organized in the framework of Dr Bojan Bilis research project:
[Post-]Yugoslav LGBT Activism: Between Nationalism and Europeanisation

The lecture is free and open to the public. Registration is not required.
For more information visit: www.arcgs.uva.nl