LGBT identities in Film: Yugoslavian Parada and queerness

Feature films from the Yugoslav successor states that ostensibly present homosexuality in fact deploy same-sex desire as a metaphor for working out anxieties about other identities, especially religion and ethnicity. This phenomenon is related to Jameson’s controversial analysis that post-colonial literature always functions as a national allegory. I have analyzed this use of the queer as metaphor in films from Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, all of which were billed as “the first gay film” from their respective countries. Such films are not made by or for queers (to paraphrase Dina Iordanova’s claim about films from the Balkans about Roma), but rather are made by straight directors for a straight national audience. Srdjan Dragojević’s film The Parade makes the intersections between queerness and ethnicity even more explicit. Though ostensibly about a Pride Parade in a region that contests the right off queers to public visibility, especially at Pride Parades, the film went on to be a box-office smash, beating out Avatar across the region. I will examine the intersections of ethnicity and sexuality that make a film like Parade into a box office hit.