Queering the 'Styling': Internationalization of Serbian Popular Music through Contextualized Staging of Queer Accents

• In Event: Gender, Ethnicity, and Queerness in East European Popular Music

Abstract

The paper explores the aspects of queer representations in mainstream popular music scenes in Serbia, and their implications for contemporary various groups identity politics in the region. The main research deals with the elements of minority identities identifiable within mainstream popular music practices in Serbia, which situate the politics of Serbian cultural identity in the context of both national and international visibility. Serbian music spheres generate the local production/consumption streams in two ways. While one is mapping a place of local music phenomena within the context of international representations of cultural diversities, the other one is also reinforcing “dominant” cultural identities in Serbia at the expense of various alternative identities, and often suppresses the political representations of minority identities, making it impossible. The elements of queering the contents, which are established as indicators of minority identities in international contextual framework, in popular practices of post-socialist transitional Serbian society have been often decontextualized in two mutually contradicted ways. The first one, recognized predominantly by international audience and local minority gender groups employs the internationally recognizable signifiers of queer cultures as a part of politically affirmative agendas, understood as queering the mainstream culture in Serbia. The second one, mostly prevailing among the local audiences, performs nationalization (homogenization) of popular culture contents, where “queering” is reappropriated as the part of the strategy for erasing any distinctiveness of alternative identities. This paper particularly looks into the specificities of dominant local music scene in Serbia, called turbo-folk, known for its heteronormative and conservative messages, and how it has been reappropriating the elements of other music scenes messages from local and international sources. Another sphere of interest is the perception of the Eurosong contest by the media and the audiences in Serbia, which also confirms the controversial status of the queering mainstream cultures of Serbian popular music scenes. The paper also looks into how ambivalent contextualizations of the elements of queer cultures reinforce the post-post-socialist and post-war constructions of cultural and political identities in Serbian society.

Author

• Marija Grujic, Institute of Literature and Art (Serbia)