engleski

The Apparitional Gay & the Invisible Everyone Else – LGBTQ Identities in Contemporary Croatian Playwriting

Although Croatian literary fiction has, in the last ten years, seen a noticeable rise in LGBTQ authors and themes, the same cannot be said about the sphere of playwriting. Seldom clearly outed and openly represented as homosexual, LGBTQ characters in Croatian drama are, in fact, always gay men and always accompanied by at least a small dose of (auto)homophobia. This means that all other “sexually variant” identities – including lesbian, bisexual, transsexual and queer – are quite literally non- existent, or rather, invisible. The representation of gay men will be considered based on the concept of the apparitional lesbian, borrowed from Terry Castle, who uses it in order to describe the “haunting” presence of lesbian identities in the history of literature. In my presentation, I will argue that the same concept can be applied to the ways in which gay men are present in contemporary Croatian plays. More often hidden than exposed, silent than loud, confused than lucid, the apparitional gay in Croatian playwriting thus becomes the prototypical figure that reveals the mainstream social attitude towards LGBTQ identities in the wider social sphere. Examining works by authors such as Vladimir Stojsavljević, Tomislav Zajec, Dino Pešut and Goran Ferčec, whose works are the (only) ones that have featured gay characters in Croatian plays, I will draw out the contours of this apparitional gay figure. I will analyse the way in which he has “lived” in Croatian theatres thus far, exploring the paradoxes of his existence, while simultaneously pointing out that a research of this kind has never been conducted before.

Croatian playwriting ; Croatian theater ; LGBTQ ; homosexuality ; Terry Castle ; Vladimir Stojsavljević ; Tomislav Zajec ; Goran Ferčec ; Dino Pešut

nije evidentirano