It has taken me time to arrive at trauma. I have been hovering around it for more than a decade, ever since I thought, perhaps somewhat naively, that sociology could help me to make sense of the way in which our lives got caught in a bewildering swirl of war and destruction. And although people say that trauma is a staple feature of our epoch, that we live in “trauma culture” (Kaplan 2005), this does not make my own less painful. Its capacity to occasionally overwhelm me at unbearable levels is not diminished—but often amplified—by the images of misery that inundate us on a daily basis. While trauma has pervaded the pages that I have written, I did not have the courage or the means for putting my finger on it—it has for long remained a stowaway in my texts, an invisible co-traveller waiting to be drawn to the surface, identified, named. It is only through years of psychotherapy and therapeutic feminist scholarship that I have now managed to take a better look at it, to approach it and touch it, and, to a certain extent, harness its colossal affective force. I could thus become more aware of how it colours numerous aspects of my existence serving as a thread that runs through generations of my ancestors and connects me—in still insufficiently recognised ways—with many of my contemporaries, extended family members and (former) conationals.1
This book is based on the idea that to be stricken by trauma means to lose a language, to witness a failure of and start looking for the primary instrument for engaging with the world (Caruth 1996). To be traumatised means to dwell in the barren fields of the incomprehensible, to be caught up in a loop of suspended time2 marked by an experience that is not completely graspable, that is impossible to fathom. The affective nucleus of trauma is a “black hole” (van der Kolk and McFarlane 1996) which words cannot penetrate: as one goes around that verbal abyss, in search of relief or even healing, one understands that the traumatic is excruciatingly hard to pinpoint. Trauma is a spasm between the constraint of remaining silent, on the one hand, and the urgency to speak, on the other. While the wound struggles to reveal itself and get a shape through words and voice, it leaves us with an impression that we have never really said what we wanted to say, we are faced with a residue that compels us to try again. Due to its fundamental verbal impenetrability, trauma is a testimony that longs to be heard but can never be fully narrated (Caruth 1996).
At the Crossroads of Trauma
The beginnings of the Yugoslav wars and the sprouts of homosexual desire coincided in my body in the early 1990s, triggering an immediate evacuation of language . A patriarchal body flooded by a homosexual urging is instantaneously silenced: it does not have the means for understanding itself because it enters a semantic void in which it has nothing to fall back on. Such a body cannot acknowledge what has never existed here, but if at all, invariably somewhere there, far from us and our capacity to name it without slowing down, lowering our voice, or expecting our facial gestures to make up for what words cannot do. Affected by a sudden loss of language , the homosexual body soaked in patriarchy slowly grows convinced of its fundamental unlovability—it starts to fidget in its effort to vanish, to become invisible. It is reluctant to meet the eye of the other because the eye is the primary “organ of shame” (Wurmser 1987; see also Drožđek et al. 2006) and shame the primary feeling, the king that reigns in the suffocating kingdom of internalised homophobia .
An almost total international isolation of Serbia at the end of the twentieth century, intensified by the insularity of my provincial, strongly patriarchal town, paralleled an internal isolation, a sense of profound yet never fully articulable estrangement from myself and the people around me that looked as a combination of lived asexuality and desired bisexuality. Terrified by the possibility of rejection, by the earthquake through which it would come, and humiliated by the omnipresent expressions of compulsory heterosexuality in which there were some virtual, unavoidably derided gays, but never ever any lesbians (Rich 1980), I started living one new, entirely secret and energy-consuming life. The feelings of shame that encircled many of us because of the criminal government, which constantly went further down the spiral of evil, resonated deeply with the shame, guilt, and excitement of my wish to be with another man. Soon I realised that my body became a site of convergence, a crossroads where the traumas of war and homosexuality intersected their affectively charged trajectories. A sort of meta-trauma emerged through a simultaneous explosion of armed conflicts and an implosion of homosexuality—it appeared at the junction between the external and internal worlds, both of which were increasingly fragmented and dispersed.
It is in such circumstances of suspended time, of solitude that seemed to linger outside of time (see Hobbes 2017), that I noticed something surprising which would become a source of inspiration and colour my tortuous personal-professional paths. The more I looked for islands of meaning that would rupture the grim everyday reality of lies, destruction, and a general social devolution, the more I encountered women: Zagorka Golubović, Biljana Jovanović, Vesna Teršelič, Sonja Liht, Vesna Kesić, Žarana Papić, Svetlana Slapšak, Biljana Kovačević-Vučo, Vesna Janković, Borka Pavićević, Rada Iveković, Nadežda Čačinovič, Đurđa Knežević, Rada Borić, Vesna Pešić, Biljana Kašić, Nadežda Radović, Sonja Biserko, Vesna Pusić, Lepa Mlađenović, Staša Zajović, and Nataša Kandić are some of those brave women who built and/or relied upon decades of (post-)Yugoslav feminist engagement to breach through the thick patriarchal membrane that lined public life in order to make it more breathable. (Much later, as I, already a migrant, started delving into that way of making sense of the world known as social theory, I learned about Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Wendy Brown, Esther Newton, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Monique Wittig and others, and I thought that it could not be by any means accidental that so many of those who offered us the instruments for navigating life would consistently or only in certain occasions refer to themselves as lesbians: arriving at social theory, it dawned on me, was a strategy of surviving and perhaps also of embracing lesbianity3/homosexuality.) Throughout the years I got to know many post-Yugoslav feminist (and) lesbian activists personally, became friends with some and took my distance from others, but regardless of whether I supported or criticised their work (or, more than anything, tried to support it through a structural, sociological critique), there has been for me no doubt that political resistance in our tortured space—the one that has been in most cases slow, unobtrusive, but resolute and persistent—has had a feminist woman voice. And it was through listening to this voice that I was also learning to speak.4
One of the most important legacies that I inherited from the 1990s feminist mobilisations was that militarism and homophobia, both of which were tearing apart my adolescent years, stemmed from the same patriarchal root—they were two heads of the same monster. This was for me the beginning of politics, my fundamental feminist insight, a moment of articulation that allowed the personal and the political to touch each other in my mind for the first time. I was ready for this insight as a brother of two older sisters (the only, longed-for son!) who was aware of the patriarchal privilege that he was invited to enjoy, but could never feel like its proper claimant. It is through fear and self-loath that non-heterosexuality pulverises what patriarchy has to offer to a “real man”. However, some of that pulverised privilege remains, sticks to a male body in the same way in which the closet eternally returns transforming coming out into an infinite loop, making it necessary again and again…
Towards an Archaeology of Lesbian Speakability
Although not all of the women who would call themselves feminists were equally vocal about homosexual liberation, I soon understood that the fusion of feminism and lesbianity was a locus of great emancipatory potential, possibly the strongest challenge to my own hetero-reality, which was expecting me to take part in misogyny and homophobia/lesbophobia. I remember the effect which the thundering words of Charlotte Bunch (1972, online) produced upon me: “Lesbianism threatens male supremacy at its core. When politically conscious and organised, it is central to destroying our sexist, racist, capitalist, imperialist system”. It was only when approaching lesbian feminist activisms that I saw the contours of less patriarchal worlds, horizons of better times (Nestle 1998)—devoid of hierarchies, injustice, and exploitation—in which I wanted to live. Often at the helm of resistance against the intersecting forces of violence5 and destruction that have surrounded us, lesbian feminists have been for decades doing what I would mostly like to capture with this book, namely teaching us a language, expanding t...
