Andrija Filipović (Web) and Aleksa Milanović (Web) (Belgrade)

Proposals by: 30.06.2026

Trans embodiments have been lived and conceptualized in multiple ways throughout the long and complex history of Southeast Europe. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, state institutions – through legal and medical frameworks grounded in early sexology – largely criminalized and pathologized transness. These classifications often entailed invasive and frequently involuntary legal and medical interventions, and were accompanied by profound social marginalization. At the same time, the reception and dissemination of sexological and juridical knowledge across Southeast Europe remained uneven, shaped by the divergent historical trajectories of the region’s post-imperial formations.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, multiple nation states emerged, each developing its own normative frameworks for regulating gender, sexuality, and other categories central to nation-building. A further seismic shift occurred after the Second World War: several states entered the Eastern Bloc, socialist Yugoslavia pursued a distinctive path through the Non-Aligned Movement, and others aligned with capitalist systems. These geopolitical configurations reverberated across disciplinary and social domains, significantly shaping how gendered lives were organized, experienced, and understood within and in relation to different socialist modernities. The end of the Cold War ushered in a new era marked by the (neo)liberalization of market economies, the institutionalization of parliamentary democracy, and process of European integration, alongside the violent dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia and its enduring socioeconomic consequences. Together, these developments have shaped the temporal and spatial structuring of the region as a semi-periphery, a condition also reflected in the lived experience and embodiment of transness. In the early twenty-first century, the region is broadly characterized by postsocialist condition, including uneven development, authoritarian tendencies, repatriarchalization, and retraditionalization – yet also by the emergence and consolidation of trans communities. Read more … (Web)

Source: ArtHist.net (Web)