Love Is the Law? LGBT+ Rights, Representative Claims, and Anti-gender Discourses in Serbia

Although Serbia adopted in 2009 Antidiscrimination Law, LGBT+ people have continued to experience violence and discrimination in all spheres of their lives. For years, LGBT+ activists have been advocating for Same-sex Union Law in order to have basic protection and legal guarantees for them and their partners, but probably it is not surprising that their claims have been largely ignored or rejected under the presumption that all individuals in Serbia have the same constitutional and civil rights and what people do within their four walls is their right to privacy. In 2021, Serbian Parliament, after years of opposition by various actors finally adopted Gender Equality Law. Additionally, in the same year, The Ministry for Human and Minority Rights and Social Dialogue initiated and drafted Same-sex Union Law, which provoked heated discussions among politicians, civil society and LGBT+ activists, conservative and ultra-right activists and religious communities. Although it seemed that the law would have been adopted by the end of Summer 2021, the whole initiative and public discussions abruptly ended when the ultimate representative President Vučić said he cannot sign that law as he is obliged to protect the Constitution implicitly referring to the constitutional definition of marriage as the union between a man and a woman. In this paper, we aim to analyze different discourses about LGBT+ rights in Serbia. We claim that Serbian case is on one hand similar to other countries with authoritarian regimes and anti-gender movements: LGBT+ rights are seen as “foreign import”, as opposed to “our family” and “our traditional values”, imposed by “Brussels”. Anti-gender discourses aim at showing that the implementation of gender equality policies, including protection from gender-based violence, sexual education, reproductive health, sexual and reproductive rights, can be equated with social engineering which comes as an impost, as a form of forced reshaping of fragile and imperilled national values. On the other hand, Serbian case could be seen as specific and particular one: the Prime Minister of Serbia, Ana Brnabić, openly lesbian woman, abroad is lauded as a woman and an LGBTQ+ person. However, as we aim to show, she is at the same time denounced by many of the alternative representatives of these two marginalized groups in Serbia as a representative of the privileged group of people: big business and economic-political elite detached from the lives of the ordinary people. She rarely if ever speaks as a woman and an LGBTQ+ representative. She represents, to quote Lisa Duggan, “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but rather upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption”. Through analysis of different and opposing discourses about LGBT+ rights in Serbia, we aim to show a particular mixture of joint anti-gender discourses and ideas of new homonormativity, which together make difficult terrain for activism and representative claims of marginalized and deprivileged LGBT+ people and activists.