Spectral fabulations: Belgrade drag performances refashioning socialist memories

Abstract

This article explores how drag performers in late postsocialist Belgrade refashion memories of socialist Yugoslavia, queering memory by disrupting the linear temporality of the postsocialist transition and challenging the erasure of the city’s socialist Yugoslav past. Belgrade is home to a thriving drag community, including a growing group of performers who engage with memories of socialist Yugoslavia, drawing on its diverse legacy from costumes, ideologies and cultural production. Analysing performance material from two of these drag identities – Gospođa Pereca and Novoslovenka – I argue that drag performers could be considered spectral fabulations, which emerge in the haunted landscape of postsocialist Belgrade, a city characterised by political depression, particularly for its LGBTQ+ community. Confronting literature on hauntings and queer performance, spectral fabulation sees drag identities in Belgrade as posthuman apparitions who use socialist memory to disrupt teleological understandings of history as well as to imagine utopian futures, which actively work against the conditions of political depression in the city. This ultimately points to the indeterminacy of the postsocialist transition, containing the potential form for both political depression and queer futurities.