Sex and Uncivil Disobedience: Girlhood and Social Class in Transitional Post-Yugoslav Cinema
In recent post-Yugoslav cinema, trope of troubled youth in films as diverse as Skinning (Stevan Filipović, 2010, Serbia), Children of Sarajevo (Aida Begić, 2012, Bosnia-Herzegovina), Spots (Aldo Tardozzi, 2011, Croatia) and Quit Staring at My Plate (Hana Jušić, 2017) allows for an inspection of the links between youth rebellion, post-conflict trauma and social class. These cinematic depictions of youth-in-crisis, which I refer to as transitional films, offer insights into locally produced ethno-national identities as challenged by the proliferating transnational networks of connectivity. In this essay, I highlight one provocative example of transitional film – Clip (Maja Miloš, 2012, Serbia). I argue that the film's provocative approach to representing girls offers insightful commentary on the performative aspects of social class in transitional post-Socialist democracies of former Yugoslavia. Moreover, I examine how the film's graphic scenes of sex might point to what Berlant & Edelman call "sex without optimism" (2013), a term that focuses on “the ways in which sex undoes the subject” (4). In Clip, sex without optimism stages an encounter that destabilizes traditional identity structures rather than reintroducing feminine libido into the patriarchal regimes of control.
2. What do the moral panics around Clip's representation of a girl's promiscuity reveal about patriarchal cultures' policing of female sexuality?
3. How can the concept of "class passing" be utilized to better understand the socioeconomic precarity prevalent in the region?
4. Consider the girls' agency in a film such as Clip. Even though the girls appear to uphold the normative standards of femininity, can their actions still be considered subversive and disruptive of the status quo?
Barthes, Roland. 1975. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang.
Berlant, Lauren and Lee Edelman. 2013. Sex, or the Unbearable. Duke University Press.
Bettie, Julie. 2003. Women Without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity. University of California Press.
Dijana Jelača
Dijana Jelača holds a PhD in Communication and Film Studies from UMass Amherst. She teaches in the Film Department at Brooklyn College. Her areas of inquiry include feminist film studies, trauma and memory studies, and South Slavic film cultures. She is the author of Dislocated Screen Memory: Narrating Trauma in Post-Yugoslav Cinema (Palgrave 2016), and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (Routledge, 2017), The Cultural Life of Capitalism in Yugoslavia (Palgrave, 2017) and The Future of (Post)Socialism (forthcoming). Her work has appeared in Camera Obscura, Feminist Media Studies, Jump Cut, Signs and elsewhere.