The Representation and Performance of the Sexual Revolution in Yugoslav Film

My (Matthias Meindl) postdoctoral thesis The Representation and Performance of the Sexual Revolution in Yugoslav Film (in progress) focuses on artistic practices and cultural discourses of the sexual revolution (of sexual revolutions) in Yugoslavia. It’s main topic is feature film, but socio-political documentaries, experimental film, popular news coverage, medicinal discourses, journals of sex education as well as theatre, literature and performance shape the cultural background which is to be retrieved. I want to analyze how Yugoslav film framed the promise of erotic happiness as a model of a liberated subject seeking its pleasure and how – this might be the artistically far more productive side – it treated the obstructions to, the dangers and the defeat of this promise. The period of examination is mainly the period from the 1960s until the break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, however, I will also want to give an outlook on more recent developments, the “neo-sexual revolutions”, against the background of the Yugoslav wars and the marginalization of the new-found countries within the European order and the order of globalized capitalism. 

The project will try to merge cultural studies and anthropological analysis of culture. Socialist Yugoslavia as an area of research allows for the analysis of the sexual revolution as a junction of antagonistic discourses: socialist/capitalist, administratively socialist/ utopian socialist, authoritarian/dissident, patriarchal/feminist, feminist/queer. My working assumption is that the sexual revolution was  a battlefield of Yugoslav identity against the background of the Cold war, with the capitalist-permissive “West” (in the context of Yugoslavia often America, Western Germany and France) as the epicenter of the sexual revolution of 1968, its subsequent feminist critique, as well as the fragmentation of Keine Vorschläge, being the far more important pole of attraction and repulsion in the Yugoslav search for cultural identity.