(Post)socialist gender troubles: Transphobia in Serbian leftist activism

Over the last few years, the highly charged debates about the role that trans women should play in leftist and feminist struggles have spilt over from the Anglo-American space into the polarised and fragmented field of Serbian activist politics. In the context of rapid impoverishment, omnipresent corruption, and constant erosion of the working class, trans women – one of the most marginalised social groups – have been constructed as an ‘arch-enemy’ provoking painful tensions and draining activist energies. In this chapter I draw upon semi-structured interviews with trans and feminist activists to explore why it is that some strands of Serbian leftist activism – which has had a hard time recovering from the 1990s’ nationalist blow – mark gender difference in such a rigid way that ‘what is socially peripheral’ becomes symbolically central (Hall, 1997) to the point of exclusion, discrimination, and verbal violence. While I focus empirically on the polemics surrounding the activist collective Marks21, whose most visible male members have been particularly vocal about the risks that trans (women’s) emancipation allegedly poses for the precarious achievements of the leftist and feminist movements, I juxtapose it with Praxis, an older Yugoslav Marxist initiative that can hardly boast about its feminist record. Within such an analytical frame, I argue that the capacity of the ‘trans question’ to split the already minuscule left side of the political spectrum is reflective of the long-term conservative and neocolonial dimensions of the Yugoslav/Serbian Left.