Brownbag: (Un)manly Feelings: Masculinity, Class, and Mourning in Contemporary Queer Narrative in Croatia

This presentation examines Dino Pešut's novel Tatin sin (Daddy's Boy, 2020) and Espi Tomičić's monodrama Your Love Is King (2020) in the context of Croatian queer coming-of-age narrative and post-Yugoslav literary culture. In particular, I focus on the theme of mourning for the ailing, working-class parent in order to explore the intersection of sexuality, class, and national origin in the literary and rhetorical staging of queer selfhood in contemporary Croatian literature. Drawing on psychoanalytical frameworks, specifically as elaborated and revised by queer and affect theory, I argue that mourning in these works should be seen as both a psychic and political “drama” of negotiating a future for a queer subject—a process characterized by ambivalence, uncertainty, and interminability that is often attributed to melancholia.