This lecture explores how drag performers in Belgrade refashion memories of socialist Yugoslavia through their performances, and how this witnessing of the space makes way for queer futurities. Since the mid 2010s, a thriving drag scene has emerged in Belgrade. Within this growing scene a phenomenon has emerged, where a small group of drag performers draw on the socialist Yugoslav legacy in their performances. I argue that these performances act as spectral fabulations – post-human apparitions that intervene in the linear temporality of the postsocialist transition, creating utopian imaginings that offer alternatives to the harsh reality of everyday life experienced by LGBTQ+ people in late postsocialist Belgrade. Drawing on my doctoral fieldwork in Belgrade, I examine how drag performers refashion aspects of Yugoslav socialism through their drag practice, queering memory while making space for utopian imaginings, such as mourning. Additionally, I look at how these performances become low histories, which challenge the teleology of the postsocialist transition by making space for multiple potentialities and queer futurities (Blagojević and Timitojević 2018). In doing so I build off scholarship that explores drag beyond its capacity for political subversion (Stokoe 2020), attempting rather to show how Belgrade’s drag performers work with and against their city’s legacies and struggles, to fabulate new ways of being together, and to survive the conditions of the present.

Jill D. Pope is a doctoral candidate in anthropology and gender studies at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, and currently a visiting researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade. Her research project focuses on drag artists in contemporary Belgrade, Serbia, and how drag performers, identities and performances are entangled with the city’s affective state. She draws on feminist, queer and trans theory to examine these countercultural practices through the dual lenses of critical care and hauntology.