Paper short abstract:

This paper explores 'failures' of political imagination and what they can tell us about distribution of an ability to be 'creative' in contemporary Europe. It focuses ethnographically on a collaboration between social anthropologists and LGBTIQ activists in Montenegro.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores 'failures' of political imagination and what they can tell us about distribution of an ability to be 'creative' in contemporary Europe. It focuses ethnographically on a collaboration between social anthropologists and LGBTIQ activists that took place from 2014 to 2016 in Montenegro. The aim of the collaboration was to think together about how to engage in progressive sexual politics beyond liberal opposition between 'individual freedom' and 'societal oppression', in a country that is hegemonically seen as 'lagging behind' and needing to 'catch up' with Europe.

'Queering Montenegro' was a collaborative initiative that attempted to offer practical answers to this dilemma. It was an attempt to think together about how to work on sexual freedom, emancipation, and progress if we understand LGBTIQ people as persons deeply embedded in relations of kinship, friendship, and various forms of obligatory reciprocity within the local social worlds, rather than as individual agents free from coerciveness of social relations. The results of the initiative were meagre: one ethnological-cum-artistic project and one 10-page publication outlining the political platform of the initiative. Many participants were somewhat disappointed by this failure of the initiative.

The paper thinks through the reasons for this, which include different organization of time in contemporary academia and NGO activism; the prevalence of civilizatory, balkanizing and paternalistic discourse of LGBTIQ human rights, as well as a particular political economy of creativity and originality in contemporary Europe.