'Goodbye Serbian Kennedy': Zoran Dindic and the New Democratic Masculinity in Serbia

Citation:

Greenberg, Jessica. 2006. “’Goodbye Serbian Kennedy’: Zoran Dindic and the New Democratic Masculinity in Serbia.” East European Politics and Societies 20 (1): 126-51. 

Author: Jessica Greenberg

Abstract:

In this article, the author demonstrates how representations of the assassination and funeral of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Dindic enacted politics, reshaping the relationship between citizen and state during a time of political crisis. The expression of citizen-state relations through public mourning grounded in intimate, familial loss produced a break between a violent, nationalist past and a possible democratic future. This process relied on the deployment of normative assumptions about gender and kinship. The figure of Zoran Dindic represented a heteronormative, democratic masculinity that evoked a new relationship between family, citizen, state, and nation in the Serbian context. In contrast, those held responsible for his assassination were presented as antifamily and part of a clan structure based on non-reproductive, criminal connections that evoked a contrasting and undemocratic form of masculinity. Such representations masked ways that current political institutions and public figures were implicated in past state violence by focusing on a story about Dindic and his killers as certain kinds of men, rather than about structural features of politics and government.

Topics: Citizenship, Clan, Democracy / Democratization, Gender, Masculinity/ies, Gendered Discourses, Governance, Post-Conflict Governance, Post-Conflict, Security, Violence Regions: Europe, Balkans Countries: Serbia

Year: 2006