Dismantling the Geotemporality of Europeanization: The First European Festival of Lesbian and Gay Film was Yugoslav

Abstract

This paper draws upon my fieldwork at the Festival of Gay and Lesbian Film in Ljubljana to examine how “Europeanness” is used to ground the legitimacy of minoritarian organizations, but also to question the assumptions implicit in such claims to belonging. I argue that the discourse of Europeanness is used in similarly ambivalent ways in both Slovenian lgbt activism and official Slovenian politics: for political and institutional legitimization that also performs a distancing from the post-Yugoslav region. This discursive distancing serves to hide the constant processes of negotiation of belonging within the eu as well as ongoing practical cooperation and communication within the post-Yugoslav region. Attention to such strategic tensions opens up a possibility of formulating a critique of the discourse that posits Europeanization as the only possible future for the region and Europe as an imagined space of tolerance for minorities.