Queering sevdah: gender-nonconformity in the traditional music of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

Sevdah, traditional Bosnian folk music, has historically articulated aesthetic, social, and gender norms of the country, while itself shifting in meaning through processes of imperialism, nation-building, and conflict. A contemporary ‘queer turn’ in sevdah music, characterised by gender non-conforming sevdah singer Božo Vrećo, offers a reimagining of the past, present, and future of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), which excavates space for the dignified life and rights of trans, gender non-conforming, and queer people. An empirical thematic analysis of YouTube comments on Vrećo’s music videos explores the singer’s surprising popularity in a purportedly socially conservative country. Several main themes are identified, including the perception of trans-ness as otherworldly and divine and the audience’s affective investment in Vrećo’s articulation of a non-nationalist queer futurity. My discussion explores these findings and how they are linked to other attempts to articulate a ‘local’ queer identity within BiH and mine the past for new political formations. I argue that these projects cultivate the ‘potentially reparative possibilities’ (Rao 2020) of the past by unsettling the notion of linear progress, which ties LGBT rights only to future Europeanisation, as well as escaping the logic of the Bosnian ethno-state that situates queerness as ‘foreign’ to BiH.