Since the mid 2010s, a thriving drag scene has emerged in Belgrade. Within this growing scene a phenomenon has emerged, where drag performers draw on socialist Yugoslav memories and imaginings in their performances. Drawing on my doctoral fieldwork in Belgrade, in this talk I examine how drag performers refashion memories of Yugoslav socialism through this queer performance practice, literally dragging the past into the present. I argue that these performances act as spectral fabulations – post-human apparitions that intervene in the linear temporality of the postsocialist transition. These spectral fabulations become forms of care, working as a form of witnessing for the postsocialist melancholia that characterises the affective state of contemporary Belgrade. In doing so, I seek 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 Pope is a PhD candidate in anthropology and gender studies based in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her doctoral research project focuses on drag performers in late post-socialist Belgrade, Serbia, using the dual lenses of critical care and hauntology to examine how these queer art practices respond to the affective state of postsocialist melancholia present in the city. Her other research interests include the politics of urban space, queer and feminist STS, and bridging occult and scientific knowledge.