CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Kahlina, Katja |
|---|---|
| Title | Sexual Politics of Belonging: Sexual Identities, Nationalism, and Citizenship in Post-Yugoslav Croatia |
| Summary | This research addresses the intersection of sexuality and nationalism in the context of individual self-identification practices of people who are marginalized on the grounds of their sexuality. It focuses on the socio-historical context of post-Yugoslav Croatia where the exclusionary treatment of sexual minorities represented the constitutive element in the process of nationalization in the 1990s, and where the rights of sexual minorities became an important part of the discourses of tolerance emerging in relation to the processes of democratization and European Union accession in 2000s. Placing the practices of self-identification in a social context where nominal sexual tolerance is present along with practices of stigmatization, violence, and discrimination, this research explores how sexually marginalized people negotiate the dominant nationalist discourses of belonging in and through the process of self-identification and self-understanding emerging in their life narratives. Drawing on postpositivist realist conception of identity as a product of dynamic interplay of the social and the personal, which opens up a space for individual agency, this project engages with the political relevance of (sexual) identity in relation to the struggles for social equality. It reveals that, in their life narratives, sexually marginalized people in Croatia develop different strategies of self-identification, some of which challenge nationalist notions of citizenship and belonging. These strategies can be identified as assimilation, queer disposition, and strategic positioning. Research also demonstrates important role that social positionality plays in shaping the emancipatory potential of (sexual) identity. By revealing that identity construction process may result in different degrees of reification and subversion of the dominant order, and possibly open up a space for non-exclusionary relations, this project questions the view of identities as inherently exclusionary and inevitably harmful for the emancipatory politics present in much of queer theory scholarship. |
| Supervisor | Barát Erzébet |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/kahlina_katja.pdf |
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