Drag for everyone: Creative industries and the becoming-visible of drag in the 21st century Belgrade

Introduction

Drag has gained unprecedented visibility in Belgrade in recent years. For example, on cable television channel N1, a station watched by a large percentage of the population, a ten-minute segment about drag artistes was shown on prime-time program The Scene in 2019 (N1, 2019). Two queens, Dekadenca and Karma Geddonia, described how they transform into their drag selves and what drag means to them. What did the Serbian audience hear? For Dekadenca, transformation is the key to drag performance, where one’s everyday self yields to the drag character. Her inspiration is the everyday woman “chewed up by patriarchy and capitalism” yet who possesses inner strength. Karma Geddonia said that she became interested in drag through RuPaul’s Drag Race and pop culture more generally. For both performers, drag is an artistic practice, which is “not related to personal preferences,” meaning that drag does not equate with being either gay/lesbian or transgender. Moreover, for Dekadenca, drag is an alternative kind of performance art available to everyone, and that is for everyone. According to her, it is a misconception to think of drag as fundamentally tied to “biological men,” especially as we “move toward a post-gender society.” Karma Geddonia adds that drag does not have to relate to gender at all, and that contemporary forms and expressions of drag may be inspired by animals, insects, and even aliens. In the interview, Dekadenca went so far in de-essentializing drag as to say that there is no drag community in Belgrade: rather, they all share a hobby.

In a country with a predominantly transphobic and homophobic population (see Stojčić and Petrović, 2016), how did drag queens come to appear in this context? What were the conditions of possibility that enabled drag queens and kings, previously unknown outside the LGBTIQ+ community, to gain this kind of media space and attention? More theoretically, what were the conditions of possibility for drag queens and drag kings to become socially recognized subjects? The speed with which drag queens and kings have become visible over the last decade is even more astounding because they had no historical predecessors in the former Yugoslavia, as I discuss in the first part of the article. In the footsteps of Félix Guattari’s insights about processes of subjectification, I will argue that the appearance of drag, and its significant rise in visibility over a very short period of time, is inextricably linked to the socioeconomic changes in contemporary Serbian society, and particularly in Belgrade, the epicenter of these changes and the most cosmopolitan environment in Serbia. The most important aspect of these changes is market liberalization, with its attendant precarization of the workforce, which is reflected in certain cultural forms produced by the creative industries sector. The history of drag is, then, in large part the history of the creative industries in Belgrade.

Drag subjectification

In this article, I will consider the processes of subjectification, via Guattari’s sense of the term as a series of paths/voices of power exercised on minds and bodies, of knowledge produced and established through the material-semiotic practices of science and economy, and of self-reference in which a subject is in emergent, processual relations with mental, social, and other stratifications (Guattari, 1996: 108; see also Guattari, 1995). I use the concept of processes of subjectification, rather than the concept of the subject, because bodies are always already included in various processes, some of which are exclusively social, while some are only partially social and more affective. These processes of subjectification are historically contingent, as the histories of trans, gay, lesbian, and other gender and sexual minority identities/subjects testify. The drag community is as historically contingent as any other “minority” community (as well as the heterosexual “majority,” for that matter, see Katz, 1995). As well as being historically contingent, the processes of subjectification are incessant (see Lazzarato, 2014). The processes of subjectification are always at work on and in bodies, always changing and adapting in their production of visibility. Drag queens are sometimes the most visible part of the LGBTIQ+ community, particularly during Pride Parades. When Dita von Bil wore traditional folk costume at the 2018 Pride Parade, she famously received a flood of threats and offensive comments on news portals and social networks. She said at the time: “Love is a traditional value, not violence and hate – that is what I want to address with my outfit. I am very proud of you and myself” (Marinović, 2018: 6).

The claim that processes of subjectification are both incessant and contingent is especially true in postsocialist Serbia, and the experience of being a member of a gender and sexual minority in socialist Yugoslavia was unique to that time and space and differs from the ways in which minority forms of life are shaped and lived now (Filipović, 2017). While it would benefit from further research, one can argue that during the socialist era in Yugoslavia, most embodiments of what is today understood as being trans, nonbinary, and queer were classified under the pathologizing medico-psychiatric rubric of transvestism. So much so that drag as we know it today, or as it was performed in the West, did not exist in Yugoslavia. However, there were female impersonators, such as Stevka Božurevka, a female character developed by comedian and impressionist Dragoljub Ljuba Stepanović. Dajana Ho, a Belgrade drag queen, recognizes this in her interview for Optimist magazine, where she reminds readers that “drag is something relatively new in Serbia, and that its roots have nothing to do with LGBT movement, unless the performer decides to join in with waving the rainbow flag” (Azdejković, 2018: 13). This is an important aspect of the drag phenomenon in Serbia because, as will be explored further in the second part of this article, it is argued by the queens themselves that potentially everyone can do drag regardless of their sexual orientation, and one of the reasons for that lies in creative industries’ push toward immaterial labor.

Transvestites and/or female impersonators, as they were called at the time, appeared occasionally in Serbian visual media during the 1990s and 2000s. Most notably, Karamela (Goran Stojićević) began performing as an impersonator of pop-folk divas in the early 1990s and, through that decade, appeared on every national TV station, including the Third Channel of Radio-Television Belgrade, and the mainstream commercial channel Pink, before switching to producing controversial scripted reality TV shows after 2010. Karamela’s shows also had VHS releases—Golden Throat (Zlatno grlo) in 1993, School for Female Singers Volume 1 and Volume 2 (Škola za pevačice 1, 2) in 1995, and Nutty Academy (Šašava akedemija) in 2001—also testifying to her popularity. Earlier, cross-dressers featured in several films as minor or supporting characters, such as in Zoran Čalić’s Ćao inspektore (1985) and Svemirci su krivi za sve (1991), and Milan Jelić’s Špijun na štiklama (1988), as well as in more substantial roles like Merlinka in Želimir Žilnik’s film Marble Ass (1995). Merlinka (Vjeran Miladinović) was the first transvestite and sex worker who came out as such in Yugoslav media, and she appeared in two films by Žilnik in 1986—Beograde, dobro jutro and Lijepe žene prolaze kroz grad. She openly identified as a transvestite in her autobiography, finished 2 years before she was killed in 2003 (Merlinka, 2013). The terms “drag queen” or “drag king” were not used before the 2010s; Karamela, Merlinka, and other individuals were seen, at best, as female impersonators to be laughed at or, at worst, transvestites who provoked disgust. The line between the performative and the sexual was not clearly drawn as some drag queens and kings aim to draw it now, but the line between performance and sexual orientation was set quite firmly—all female impersonators were heterosexual as far as the public was concerned. Contemporary drag is not connected to the female impersonators and transvestites of the late 20th century. Drag, as a term and a cultural form, only appeared in Serbia when certain conditions were met, such as the mainstreaming of LGBTIQ+ culture, and economic liberalization—gentrification and the expansion of cultural industries being the most relevant aspects of the latter in Belgrade. Together with the influence of international pop culture in the form of RuPaul’s Drag Race, these conditions enabled the appearance of drag on the Belgrade LGBTIQ+ cultural scene in the second decade of the 21st century.

Janion (2020) argues in her study of cross-dressing in 1990s Poland, that “drag is an Anglo-American phenomenon which spread around the world with globalization, the expansion of American consumerism, and the internalization of gay identities,” which means that when translated and adapted to the non-American and non-Western context, drag is “an unstable, contextual category, whose flickering meanings are highly gendered, racialized, and classed” (3). While Janion recognizes that drag blends with “local ideologies and institutions of gender/sexuality,” and that it assumes “various hybrid forms,” she employs the definition of a drag queen as “a homosexual man who performs femininity onstage to an audience that is aware that he is male” (3). This is the definition used in the present article, although it remains contestable if one has to be homosexual in order to perform drag since some Serbian drag queens and kings, as noted above, state that it can be a hobby rather than an expression of gender variance or sexual orientation. One could argue, together with Ho (2018: 3), that under the current form of capitalism in Serbia, where a considerable proportion of the production of surplus value is dependent on immaterial labor, where signifiers of gender are as marketable as any consumer product, sexual orientation matters very little—as may be concluded from the statements of some drag performers, such as Dekadenca, quoted at the beginning of this article. In relation to the LGBTIQ+ community, this production is performed through particular technologies that include various forms of (in)visibilization.

Creative industries and the becoming-visible of drag

The development of the creative industries is connected to government efforts to liberalize the economy and make it more acceptable for European Union accession. Hence the founding of the Advisory Board for Creative Industries in 2018, and development of strategies for furthering the creative industries agenda, that is, the agenda of restructuring, privatization, and market liberalization. The government website states:

Creative industries are an important sector of the Serbian economy, with between 3.4% and 7.1% of GDP, and they are growing faster than the rest of the economy. This sector includes over 30 000 registered firms, employing more than 115 000 workers, of whom 70% are 25-44 years old, half of whom are university educated, and a large number are women. The creative industries include publishing, print media, graphics, IT and software development, the advertising, music and film industries, design, radio and television, fashion, traditional crafts. (Vlada Republike Srbije, N/A)

The Advisory Board and its projects are presented on the Serbia Creates platform, with the purpose of “affirming the values of contemporary Serbia—creativity, innovation, and originality. This project has the goal of recognizing, affirming, and highlighting every successful creative undertaking in the areas encompassed by the knowledge economy” (Vlada Republike Srbije, N/A). Creative industries hotspots in Belgrade are located in recently gentrified parts of the city, such as Savamala, Cetinjska Street, and around Belgrade Waterfront. A material-semiotic nexus is created by materially interrelating creative industries, gentrification, and the production of various subjectivities including drag performers. It is this material-semiotic nexus which amplifies the becoming-visible of drag, which would otherwise perhaps remain on the margins of LGBTIQ+ urban culture.

I use the concept of creative industries (see Bolaño, 2015; Lovinik and Rossiter, 2007; Hartley, 2005) to argue that the products of both popular and high culture produce and reproduce individuals as belonging to a certain social class, race, gender, and sexuality. The tension between “high” and “low” culture is very much present in this context. Drag itself produces such tension by creating both “high” art and “low” popular culture through complex performances and “plain” lip-syncs. I put plain in quote marks because there is nothing plain about these. They are as rich with meaning as any work of art. Furthermore, creative industries, through the (re)production of LGBTIQ+ subjects as consumers, naturalize LGBTIQ+ subjects and their social position. They produce a particular kind of visibility which is then taken to signify the whole existence of LGBTIQ+ subjects (for more on (in)visibilization see Filipović, 2019). By being made visible through creative industries practices, LGBTIQ+ individuals and, in this case, drag queens and kings are naturalized both as producers of real and symbolic capital through immaterial, affective, and other forms of labor and as consumers of products made through such forms of labor.

While LGBTIQ+ infrastructure, in the sense of bars, clubs, bookstores, and other places for the production and consumption of popular culture, proliferated and became more visible in the West in the years following the Stonewall Riots, it was different in Serbia due to the social, economic, and political situation, namely, the 1945–1991 Yugoslav regime of state socialism. The situation started changing only in the late 1980s, first in Ljubljana, Slovenia, with the formation of activist group Lesbian Lilith in 1985, campaigning for the recognition of gay and lesbian rights (Gočanin, 2014), and with the first European gay and lesbian film festival, Magnus, in 1984 (Kajinić, 2016). In Belgrade, however, only months after a similar Serbian organization, Arkadija, was founded, the Yugoslav wars broke out, and most activists changed their focus to anti-war and peace campaigning instead of gender and sexual minority issues. Those years, the 1990s, were marked by economic and social isolation and by growing resistance to the regime of Slobodan Milošević. A network of alternative and pro-European/pro-Western art and cultural production developed, including publishing venture Rende, part of the oppositional B92 radio and TV station. Rende published some works by gay and lesbian authors, both Serbian/Yugoslav and translated from English. The years following the fall of Milošević in 2000 have seen a succession of attempts to hold Pride Parades (Bilić, 2016) and the emergence of infrastructure in the form of gay and lesbian bars and clubs. At the time of writing in 2020, there is still no dedicated LGBTIQ+ bookstore or other cultural or business space like there is in major cities in the West—only one dedicated club, two bars, and a sauna.

Knowledge about the history of gay and lesbian clubs and bars in Belgrade is mostly confined to oral tradition within the LGBTIQ+ community. The earliest club was named X. It opened in 1997 and closed in 2006. It was the only gay club in the city for almost 10 years, except from 2003 to 2004 when the club Can-Can was also in operation. Burmaz, while unfortunately not precise in what he means by “transgender” and “transsexual,” wrote that X “gathered a wide circle of patrons, regardless of musical taste, age, gender, sexual and social status... because on Friday and Saturday nights when it operated as a gay club, popular music was played in two blocks, first ‘foreign’ then ‘domestic’... Even though patrons were mostly gay men of different backgrounds, there were lesbians, transgender, transsexual, and straight individuals among them” (Burmaz, 2014: 199). Floyd opened after X (the exact date may not have been documented), followed by Alijansa in 2006–2007, and VIP in 2007. Toxic was opened in 2008, then Hrabro Srce and Van Helsing in 2009, and in 2010 Apartman and Pleasure. Most of these venues were patrolled by the police, as gay-bashing in the vicinity of the clubs was a frequent problem. Today, there is only one dedicated LGBTIQ+ club, called Pleasure, located near the National Assembly in the city’s downtown. The fact that there is now only one dedicated club does not mean that LGBTIQ+ creative industries disappeared in the second decade of the 21st century. Similar to cities in the West, the bar and club scene was dispersed, the main reason in Belgrade being the liberalization of the economy and the attendant gentrification of the city. Policing also changed with the dispersion, and today, there is no visible police presence around these bars and clubs, which points toward changing social norms, as well as the mainstreaming of LGBTIQ+ culture.

The Savamala neighborhood provides a good example of the relationships between gentrification, economic liberalization, and the processes of LGBTIQ+ (in)visibilization and mainstreaming. In the early 2000s, Savamala was a neglected and dangerous place. It was also the location of gay and lesbian club Apartman, and organized gay-bashing occurred near the club. All that changed in the 2010s, when Savamala was rebranded as the main bohemian quarter and creative district of the city, and bars, galleries, and clubs multiplied. Apartman closed down, probably because the bulk of the patrons moved elsewhere, and thus, a gay and lesbian club scene that was previously concentrated in a single space became spread around the whole neighborhood. KC Grad, Mixer House, and a number of other clubbing/cultural spaces opened, most of which have also served as venues for LGBTIQ+ events during Pride weeks. KC Grad is also one of the hotspots of drag activity today. Other locations in Belgrade have also become hubs of creative industries, like the complex of bars and clubs in the former brewery on Cetinjska Street. Several bars in the complex are also entertainment venues where drag queens and kings put on performances. The bar Dim, for example, hosts Dekadenca’s and Markiza de Sada’s bingo night “The Last Chance.” Altogether, the drag scene functions within a different framework from the previous decade’s LGBTIQ+ bar and club scene. The LGBTIQ+ club and bar scene is now diffuse because of economic liberalization, and the emphasis is on creative industries, that is, on the production of real and symbolic capital through immaterial, affective, intellectual, and manual labor. The club and bar scene is no longer focused exclusively on sexual and gender identity, as was the case in the early 2000s. Thus, drag is performed in settings that are no longer reserved for LGBTIQ+ patrons but are now open to everyone.

As Dekadenca said on The Scene, drag is for everyone—and especially for the precarious class of creative industries workers, as a Vice article testifies (Jakšić, 2018). All of the drag queens interviewed in the piece point out that they are not paid properly and they do not earn enough to cover all their expenses for their shows, such as makeup, clothes, shoes, and props. To be a drag performer means, then, to spend in order to become a producer of symbolic capital and its affective effects on the bar/club scene and urban creative industries in general. The article also shows that there is an emergent and diverse drag “market,” ranging from “classic” drag shows to performing drag just for video and photographs. The underlying narrative is that there is a market niche for every drag queen, if she is market savvy enough. (Drag kings are not mentioned). A sort of entrepreneurship of the self is constructed and projected, in which it is assumed that every drag queen can succeed if she is considered “the real deal.”

The birthday celebration of the Haus of KayGie, a group of drag artistes who often perform at KC Grad, demonstrated the diversity of drag queens on the Belgrade scene. The announcement for the 16 December 2018 show, posted on the KC Grad website and Facebook page, read as follows:

This year we celebrated all the colors of the rainbow in various places with wonderful people, and now we round up this multicolored year by celebrating the first birthday of the little house of #KayGie drag queen duo with our loved ones.

Most events are announced via online social networks, usually Facebook. On 19 October 2019, there was a “domestic ball, drag show and pop party” organized in KC Grad by the Haus of KayGie, including Dekadenca, Lana Vee, Ostroga Mi, Asia Gemini, Golden Orb, Aurora Obscene, Karma Geddonia, Lucy Fer, and drag king Mali Srba. The entrance fee was 300 dinars (just under three euros), with badges depicting drag queens sold for a couple of hundred dinars at the doors. The event was described as follows: “For this event we’re at home, baby! We celebrate the charms of our culture in KC Grad, and together with female and male drag artists we represent local everyday life, in a domestic ball and local drag show with our famous queens” (Grad, 2019a). The event had competition categories connected to Serbian culture, including “The Housewife and the Head of the Household,” “Jelena Karleuša Runway,” “Slavic Mythology,” and “Corporate Executives.” The “Housewife/Head of the Household” category is described as “from the dinner table to the everyday chores of the practical woman and the married man, we open a category for deconstructing and rethinking these figures.” “Jelena Karleuša Runway” is dedicated to Serbian singer Jelena Karleuša, named as a “queer ally” in the event listing. The “Corporate Executives” category is outlined as follows: “Executive reality such as Ana Brnabić, bank clerks, angry checkout operators and others,” with a jab at the openly lesbian Serbian Prime Minister. (For more on the reception of Ana Brnabić in Serbian political life, including the way that she gains partial exceptionalism from discrimination due to social class, something that may be implied and critiqued in listing her in this event advertisement alongside bank clerks and checkout staff, see Bilić, 2020: 161–189.) The last category is the Free category, listed with the hashtag #BeYourself, and dedicated to “all those who do not find themselves in other categories.”

This event was, in principle, open to everyone; however, as it was organized at KC Grad, a creative industries hotspot popular with an LGBTIQ+ clientele, most patrons were lesbians and gay men, judging by the response to one shout-out by the hostess. The crowd was also noticeably youthful, in their early twenties if not younger, as the presence of a mother who came to support her son indicates. The age of the drag queens, as well as the patrons, is significant as it shows the influence of RuPaul’s Drag Race. One could argue that the sudden boom of the Belgrade drag scene is partly inspired by the TV show. The program has certainly left its mark on the conceptualization of what it means to be a drag queen and on queens’ visual presentation. However, the queens themselves are ambivalent about the effects of Drag Race on the local scene, and some are unhappy about it, saying that certain forms of drag are excluded from the Belgrade scene, not being considered correct because they are absent from the TV show. This especially pertains to art drag queens and those whose work questions normative gender presentation and the gender binary.

There was another drag show in KC Grad on 15 February 2020 called “KayGie: Queer Valentine Drag Show + Party.” It is announced with the following text:

I love you the first time,

I love you the last time,

I love you forever!

The “Last Chance” bingo nights hosted by Dekadenca and Markiza de Sada at Dim on Cetinjska Street are another interesting drag event format. The bingo session on 29 December 2019 was attended by a far more diverse audience, including tourists and some heterosexual parents with children. The event was announced as follows on Facebook:

Following famous proverbs such as the white snowman brings luck, and the third luck is the greatest, established stars of Belgrade nightlife, known for their solo shows, their work with the Ephemeral Confessions collective and their double-acts, Dekadenca and Markiza de Sada present a pre-New Year edition of their games at Last Chance!

Several significant points are shown by these last two listings, as well as by other quotes above. The events are advertised primarily on Facebook. This very fact speaks of the ubiquity of digital technologies. Moreover, it could be argued that use of digital technology is the sine qua non of the creative industries (as may be gathered from the phrasing on the government website), and as such it is integral to the subjectification of drag. In other words, there is no “drag for everyone” without that central feature of 21st century creative industries, digital technology. Drag queens and kings use digital platforms to announce their events, while consumers on these digital platforms use them to hear about events. Drag queens and kings and the audience, the site users, are all subjectivized as consumers of digital technologies and then as producers of immaterial labor, of symbolic capital and, later, of real capital. In regard to immaterial labor, as already noted, it can be affective, intellectual, emotional, etc. The affective-emotional aspect of immaterial labor can be observed in the use of emoji and exclamation points. Emoji are ideograms used in online communication to convey an emotional state, and their use in this context reveals the usually hidden side of affective labor performed by both drag queens and kings in their attempt to participate in creative industries and by the users who are affectively implicated through the act of reading the event announcement. We are affectively attuned by a heart emoticon and various emoji to feel visual and other kinds of pleasure and to connect these kinds of pleasure with participation in creative industries.

Another important aspect is the audience. The audience at these drag shows is mostly made up of men and women in their early twenties and late teens, as noted above. The drag performers themselves are the same age, with a few exceptions. The age dimension also ties in to the dematerialization of work and the important role digital technologies play in the assemblage of drag performances, creative industries, and changing socioeconomic circumstances such as precarization, as well as urban gentrification. The younger gay and lesbian patrons and drag performers, being digital natives themselves, accept this assemblage as not only inevitable but as natural too. How else would they organize and make their events visible to as wide a public as possible, so the naturalized reasoning goes. The same goes for the form and content of event announcements and descriptions, especially with regard to abbreviations and references to pop culture phenomena. Furthermore, the lists of drag performers above include several names who appear in all the events. That shows that the scene is coalescing and that there are recognizable drag performers, some of whom will attract to an event their own fans and followers, who also keep in touch via social networks, personal websites, and other digital platforms. Diversification is also stressed as important, and diversity is celebrated as one of the most important values. Difference itself is what makes drag performers and is a basis of the LGBTIQ+ community. That is the narrative that can be read from these event descriptions. However, one can argue that it is this very diversity and difference that is being capitalized on in creative industries discourse. The Serbia Creates text about creative industries, as quoted at the beginning of this section, states that “creativity, innovation, and originality” are values of contemporary Serbia: those values are exactly the ones exploited for production of real and symbolic capital in KC Grad and the Cetinjska Street complex during drag performances.

Drag came to the Cetinjska Street complex by way of KC Grad and the creative industries in Savamala. Savamala was the first neighborhood in Belgrade to be gentrified via creative industries, and its gentrification was later used as a springboard for building Belgrade Waterfront. Gentrification in Belgrade is somewhat different from that in cities in the West. (For detailed discussion of gentrification in postsocialist cities, see Kubeš and Kovács, 2020; for Belgrade in much more detail Petrović and Backović, 2019.) As Backović (2015: 183) observes

there are sporadic examples of conversion of space (Beton Hala, KPGT, BIGZ, KC Grad, projects in Savamala…), in which derelict spaces are revitalized through culture, especially via the creation of cultural centers. As these do not have a residential function, it can be concluded that, similar to other postsocialist cities, there is no pioneer gentrification in Belgrade. However, these projects influence the creation of alternative cultural spaces, which contribute to different use of urban space and to somewhat different lifestyles.

Arguably, “different use of urban space” means being the foundation for creative industries. The areas that are now gentrified like Savamala were spaces with alternative cultural centers (Magacin), galleries, and hybrid venues that combined commercial and alternative cultural production (such as KC Grad). This hybridization of marginal and alternative with commercial was the first step toward the full gentrification and the influx of creative industries. The lifestyles that appeared during, and in the aftermath of, gentrification have been subsumed into the overarching framework of the free-market economy, where the difference itself produces both symbolic and real capital.

The large redevelopment at Belgrade Waterfront “is a combination of commercial and residential luxury space. It is a foreign investment project for which the state provided land and offered clear support. If realized on the planned scale, it will transform that part of the city through the process of profitable gentrification. The space will only be affordable for members of the elite and foreign citizens” (Backović, 2015: 183). The project has been controversial from the very start, for reasons including the influx of overseas capital that altered the local landscape and, with it, a decades-old local ways of life (Eror, 2015; Rudić, 2019; Wright, 2015). Savamala is adjacent to Belgrade Waterfront. In some cases, older buildings that served as creative industries hubs were torn down, and workers and businesses were moved to the Cetinjska Street complex. The story of the Cetinjska Street complex shows how implicated it is in the liberalization/gentrification processes reshaping Belgrade. The appearance of drag within the complex is not independent of these processes. Without market liberalization, there would not be urban gentrification, without which there would not be bars and clubs more open to LGBTIQ+ people. Without further market liberalization, there would not have been dispersal of the original LGBTIQ+ club scene, and drag would not have become as accessible to everyone as it is now in Savamala and the Cetinjska Street complex.

The visibilization of the drag community is essentially connected to the processes of economic liberalization and urban gentrification. It appears that the production of subjectivity occurs through material-semiotic flows and nodes such as material infrastructure, economy, laws, and city and state policies. The visibility of drag in Serbia appears to depend not exclusively on liberalization of societal norms, as the usual discourse of human rights goes, but on the complex intersections of a multiplicity of material-semiotic flows, the most important of which, in this analysis, appears to be the push toward a neoliberal market economy and the consequent entrepreneurship of the self through creative, affective, and cognitive labor. This also entails disenfranchisement within the LGBTIQ+ community, as not everyone is able or willing to participate given their gender presentation, age, class, disability, and political stance. The becoming-visible of drag entails the becoming-invisible of some individuals within the LGBTIQ+ community, given the material-semiotic conditions that enable its appearance. Drag queens and kings also sometimes set themselves apart from this form of LGBTIQ+ community that is lived within the bounds of the culture industry, via performances that are more overtly political than the usual drag show fare in commercial venues. The work of Ephemeral Confessions and Dajana Ho should be mentioned, as they stage the most political performances on the Belgrade drag scene (see Seecult, 2019; Ho, 2018). Belgrade drag, then, is as complex a phenomenon as the LGBTIQ+ community it belongs to.

Conclusion

Although a phenomenon only about half a decade old, drag in Belgrade appears as a hypercomplex assemblage. The processes of drag subjectification include individual bodies, their mutual relations, their relations to their environment (social, economic, and political), as well as their relation to the history within which they create and labor, from pop-cultural history directly related to drag to the postsocialist history of Serbian society in general. These bodies perform a multiplicity of forms of labor in order to be subjectivized as drag queens and kings. In relation to this, the conditions of possibility for the appearance of drag are, as mentioned above, liberalization of the market and gentrification of certain parts of the city, which also reflect the dispersal of the gay and lesbian club and bar scene. Drag appeared at a moment when there were only a handful of dedicated gay and lesbian clubs and bars remaining. Most bars and clubs in gentrified areas now describe themselves as “LGBT friendly,” and drag is performed for everyone—while potentially everyone could do drag, if it is indeed the case that drag’s ties to the LGBTIQ+ community are dissolved in the context of the transitional economy and the precarity of creative industries. The history of drag in 21st century Belgrade is inextricably intertwined with economic liberalization and precarization, and with urban gentrification.

These relations with economic liberalization, precarization, and gentrification—that is, relations with creative industries—point to the perspective that the future of Serbian drag lies in its total dematerialization, which is also depoliticization. Drag will finally become for everyone, purely performative, as Dekadenca wants it to become, when the production of surplus value becomes completely immaterial. Such a future is as near as the final transition from postsocialist to contemporary Western society. That is, drag will never be fully dematerialized, as the promised future of postindustrial European society keeps moving away out of reach no matter how thoroughly socioeconomic reforms are conducted. Despite its seemingly thriving within the culture industry, drag remains tightly bound to gender and sexual minorities in cis-heteronormative and patriarchal society, so the dream of Serbian drag queens and drag kings of drag becoming for everyone, just like the dream of becoming contemporary European society, is deferred to some distant and perhaps unreachable future.