Minority sexualities, kinship and non‐autological freedom in Montenegro
2021; Wiley; Volume: 29; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1469-8676.13062
ISSN1469-8676
Autores Tópico(s)Romani and Gypsy Studies
ResumoI propose an alternative conception of freedom in an actually existing liberal order by focusing on how gay men in Podgorica, Montenegro maintain love and kinship relations. For theorists of late liberalism, the demands of liberal freedom and those of social relatedness have been seen as opposed. By contrast, in Podgorica we can trace a notion of non-autological freedom understood as an ability to engage in a certain practice while thinking through its conditions and constraints from multiple perspectives and in a way that my interlocutors saw as respectful of others. Linking anthropological discussions of freedom with a focus on ordinary ethics, I offer an understanding of freedom as a relational category practised through an open and shared deliberation and imaginative identification, which echoes Polanyi’s notion of social freedom. Gay men who pursued love and sexual fulfilment as well as stringent family expectations did not enact freedom as always-already individualised subjects who made autonomous choices; they came into being as particular socio-moral persons by deliberating either collectively, through an actual conversation, or by engaging in imaginative identification with others. By placing both relationality and deliberation at the heart of freedom, this article contributes to anthropological discussions about this concept. Je propose une conception alternative de la liberté dans un ordre libéral existant en me concentrant sur la manière dont les hommes homosexuels de Podgorica, au Monténégro, entretiennent des relations amoureuses et de parenté. Pour les théoriciens du libéralisme tardif, les exigences de la liberté libérale et celles de la parenté sociale ont été considérées comme opposées. En revanche, à Podgorica, nous pouvons trouver la trace d'une notion de liberté non-autologique. Celle-ci est comprise comme une capacité à s'engager dans une certaine pratique tout en réfléchissant à ses conditions et contraintes à partir de perspectives multiples, et d'une manière que mes interlocuteurs considèrent comme respectueuse des autres. En reliant les discussions anthropologiques sur la liberté à l'éthique ordinaire, je propose une compréhension de la liberté comme une catégorie relationnelle pratiquée à travers une délibération ouverte et partagée, et d’une identification imaginative, ce qui fait écho à la notion de liberté sociale de Polanyi. Les hommes gays qui recherchaient l'amour et l'épanouissement sexuel tout en répondant aux attentes strictes de leur famille ne pratiquaient pas la liberté comme des sujets toujours déjà individualisés qui faisaient des choix autonomes; ils sont devenus des personnes socio-morales particulières en délibérant soit collectivement, par une conversation réelle, soit en s'engageant dans une identification imaginative avec les autres. En plaçant la relationnalité et la délibération au coeur de la liberté, cet article contribute aux discussions anthropologiques sur ce concept. Scene One: It’s a cold October evening in 2013 in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. I am going to Mirko’s place. Mirko, a man in his mid-thirties, has been one of my best friends for many years. He is also the director of the most prominent LGBT organisation in Montenegro and the second gay man who publicly came out in the country, in 2012. The building where he lived was in the centre of the town. In the dark front yard, I noticed two silhouettes standing nearby, looking at me. Instead of getting scared, I realised these were probably the police officers assigned to Mirko when he publicly came out as gay. The conditions of Mirko’s individual freedom in this context – to be a gay man out in the Montenegrin public sphere – included regular police protection for several months. The police officers were difficult to spot if you did not know they were around. They kept Mirko safe. They also blurred the boundary between freedom and constraint. Scene Two: I went to Ivan’s house to watch a film with him and his long-term partner Nikola. Following the pattern of most unmarried people in Montenegro, Ivan lived in the same house as his parents most of his life. When I arrived, I first entered the living room to greet Ivan’s mother and father. After a brief chat with them, I headed for the bedroom where Ivan and Nikola regularly spent at least four nights a week. The other three nights they were in Nikola’s small rented apartment on the other side of the town. Nikola told me about his day – after work, he cooked lunch with Ivan’s mother. I remembered that Ivan’s father recently helped him to fix a bicycle. Despite the family intimacy and the sleepovers in the same bedroom of the parental house, theirs was effectively still the ‘love that dares not speak its name’.11 ‘The love that dare not speak its name’ is a phrase from the poem ‘Two Loves’ written by Alfred Douglas and published in 1894. The phrase is usually interpreted as referring to homosexuality. For years Ivan and Nikola have lived in a ‘transparent closet’ (Švab and Kuhar 2014). No one in the family speaks openly about the fact that they are in a relationship.22 Švab and Kuhar developed the concept of a ‘transparent closet’ to ‘describe a situation in which family members are informed about a child's homosexuality but refuse to accept the consequences of their child’s coming out’ (2014: 15). Ivan and Nikola kept most of their bodily intimacy behind the closed doors, while Ivan’s parents kept their eyes and ears shut. *** These two scenes pose challenges to the conventional liberal opposition between being free and being watched by the police; between ‘coming out’ and ‘hiding in a closet’; between autological subjectivity and genealogical society, to use the terms offered by Elizabeth Povinelli. In Povinelli’s vocabulary, the autological subject refers to ‘discourses, practices, and fantasies about self-making, self-sovereignty, and the value of individual freedom associated with the Enlightenment project of contractual constitutional democracy and capitalism’ (2006: 4). Genealogical society refers ‘to discourses, practices, and fantasies about social constraints placed on the autological subject by various kinds of inheritances’ (2006: 4). Both terms refer to forms of governance of body, intimacy, and sexuality in late liberalism – including in Montenegro. However, it would be wrong to assume that Mirko’s public coming-out makes him a good autological subject. Or that Ivan’s silence about his relationship with his parents makes him (only) suffer under the constraints of the genealogical interrelatedness. In both scenes we find elements of individual freedom and social constraint. The not-quite-liberal dynamic between them needs further exploration. A focus on the ways in which people manage to be both gay and someone’s children (or LGBT activists both fighting the state and depending on that same state for police protection) speaks about the need to link anthropology of morality with anthropological thinking on relationality. In his work on Jain ascetic and confessional practices in India, James Laidlaw (2002) framed freedom as a socially and historically grounded possibility to choose and work on a preferred project of crafting oneself into a particular personhood. Freedom of the ethical subject ‘consists in the possibility of choosing the kind of self one wishes to be’ (Laidlaw 2002: 324), that is, in the possibility to practise chosen ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault 1988: 16). This concept of freedom is historically specific, definite and limited – it does not presuppose the existence of (neo)liberal agents free from social constraints, who can be whatever they choose to be. However, it still does not quite reflect the position of my gay Montenegrin friends, because it focuses on an individualised subject. The ways in which moral deliberation actually took place among gay men in Montenegro suggests that we need to develop an understanding of freedom as a relational category that emerges between people and that regulates their interpersonal relations. What happens with our understanding of ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ when – instead of a more or less coherent, singular ethical system (for example, Jainism) that the subject may or may not choose to practise in order to become this kind of self that one wishes to be – the situation is more complex? What happens with it when ‘actively answering the ethical question of how or as what one ought to live’ (Laidlaw 2002: 324) means wanting to be both a gay person and a loving son, in a social context that actively denies this possibility? I argue that in such situations we can find a non-autological understanding of freedom as a responsibility towards self-in-relationship-with-others. As a reflection of emic ideas among gay men in Podgorica, the notion of non-autological freedom can help us to widen the scope of freedom as an anthropological analytical concept. From an anthropological perspective, freedom is the capacity of a person to engage in ‘ethical reflection, reasoning, dilemma, doubt, conflict, judgement, and decision’ (Laidlaw 2014: 23) regarding what kind of a socio-historically particular person to become. This capacity remains stable across diverse spatio-temporal conjuctures, while the particularities of the conjuncture shape the ‘codes’ through which freedom can be practised, as Heywood (2015) illustrates in his discussion of ‘double morality’ in Italy. In other words, understood as an analytical anthropological device, freedom is not a socio-historically specific, Western/Global North category (as Holbraad 2018 warns), but a capacity that people share across socio-cultural contexts and that includes both emancipation and oppression in a specific configuration (Sopranzetti 2017; Leach 2009; Venkatesan 2016; Lino e Silva and Wardle 2019). A good example of this focus on the ethnographic configurations in which freedom may emerge is the work of Lino e Silva who, writing an alternative history of queer liberation in a Brazilian favela, claims that it is possible to find ‘minoritarian’ forms of liberalism in ‘political territories that are not assumed to be the homeland of liberal values’ (2019: 145; forthcoming). Some anthropologists have suggested that we need to pay attention to affect, emotions and intuition in order to better understand the freedom to pursue a certain ethical project (MacDougall 2019; Miller and Lukes 2019). Others have argued that a focus on ordinary ethical judgement, as a practice immersed into the routines of the everyday life, resolves the binary between ‘freedom’ and ‘obligation’ (Lambek 2010; Das 2015). Yet, I think that freedom should remain a part of anthropological analytical vocabulary, especially if understood as a shared and relational capacity to deliberate on the good and the right thing to do. I argue that non-autological freedom is a form of freedom pursued in an everyday life through an open and shared deliberation premised on imaginative identification – rather than through the moral reasoning of an individual subject focused on choosing a particular ethical framework in the moments of a moral breakdown. The framework of moral philosophy developed by Sophie Grace Chappell (2014, 2019) is useful for thinking about freedom as a part and parcel of ordinary ethics – particularly her notions of open deliberation, shared deliberation and imaginative identification. These three concepts, discussed in detail later in the article, are crucial for understanding the contours of non-autological freedom among my interlocutors and I refer to them cumulatively as ‘reflexive relationality’. For my interlocutors, freedom was shared inasmuch as it involved an ability to engage in a certain practice, while thinking through its conditions and constraints from multiple perspectives and in a way that they saw as respectful of others. Their non-autological freedom was not so much about choosing a moral personhood, but about reflexive relationality – that is, it was about deliberating in an open way, with others and/or from their perspectives, how to navigate social relations in a way that enabled my interlocutors to stay true to themselves and simultaneously to feel they treated others with respect. For the socialist, ‘acting freely’ means acting while conscious of the responsibility we bear for our part in mutual human relationships – outside of which there is no social reality – and realizing that we have to bear this responsibility. Being free therefore no longer means, as in the typical ideology of the bourgeois, to be free of duty and responsibility but rather to be free through duty and responsibility. It is not the freedom of those who are relieved of the necessity to choose but of those who choose, not freedom of relief from duty but the duty which one assigns oneself; it is thus not a form of releasing oneself from society but the fundamental form of social connectedness, not the point at which solidarity with others ceases but the point at which we take on the responsibility of social being, which cannot be shifted onto others. (2018 [1927]: 22) Polanyi develops the notion of social freedom as a philosophical response to the criticisms that 20th-century socialism fails to address people’s visions of a good life, focusing instead exclusively on socio-economic injustices. He considers under what conditions one of the key liberal values – freedom – could enter the socialist vocabulary and become a part of the ‘grammars of socialism’, to paraphrase Fedirko et al. (this issue). For Polanyi, freedom is possible through ‘social knowledge’, that is, awareness of all the ways in which our actions affect others – including through economic relations, law, politics, and so forth. The fundamental similarity with the concept of non-autological freedom lies in the placing of reflexive relationality at the heart of freedom: both the understanding of freedom among gay men in Podgorica and Polanyi’s notion of social freedom is about deliberating on the ways in which we should move through social relations so that we do what we wish while being responsible towards others. The key difference is that Polanyi’s prescriptive, progressive and emancipatory concept of social freedom presumes an equal distribution of this responsibility among all members of a polity,33 For Polanyi, this requires a global political community. while this was not the case for the gay men from Podgorica. Polanyi’s social freedom is possible only if all people engage in shared deliberation and invest more or less the same effort into figuring out how their actions affect others – while my gay interlocutors seemed to invest more effort into considering their responsibility for their part in social relationships than their family members did towards them. This meant gay men often seem to accommodate their families’ homophobia in their own lives. It also meant that the interpretative labour that my interlocutors invested into social relations seemed to be heavier than that of others towards them. Before I illustrate this argument ethnographically, let me briefly position myself and describe my fieldwork. As a bisexual woman from Montenegro who lives abroad, I shared some, but far from all, experiences, questions and concerns of my interlocutors from Podgorica. My motivation for this article was provoked by a conversation from several years ago in which Ivan said that our mutual gay acquaintance ‘is not like Nikola and me, he is not free’, while I jumped in and asserted ‘but neither are you and Nikola free’, confusing and embarrassing him. I wanted to understand the conditions under which some gay men in Podgorica could see themselves as free. I have been learning about the life of LGBT people in Podgorica since 2011 as a friend and as an ethnographer who has been involved in the Montenegrin LGBT human rights movement from its early days. I have been in touch with the LGBT activists’ worlds ever since I chaired the founding meeting of Queer Montenegro – which later became one of the most prominent human right NGOs working on LGBT human rights issues in the country. Mirko asked me to chair this meeting back in 2013, because he needed someone other than him willing to have their name visible in the signature of a document that had to be taken to the relevant state institutions in order to officially register the organisation. I also learned about the lives of gay men from Podgorica through a collaboration I organised between LGBT activists and anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers in 2014–16 called ‘Queering Montenegro’. Supported by the Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung, the aim of this three-year set of meetings in Podgorica was to formulate contextually sensitive ideas on how to fight homophobia and transphobia in Montenegro. Furthermore, I attended five out of eight (to date) Montenegro Pride Parades in 2013–15 and in 2019–20, as well as various other LGBT events and parties; I prepared a ‘Queer Dreambook’ (Brković 2016); and I provided free consultations to my activist friends on various topics over the years. I forged and/or deepened many personal friendships through this work. I learnt also through ten semi-structured interviews I conducted with gay men in 2012 aiming to understand their perspective on gender, sexuality and activism. In 2019, I conducted seven more interviews with gay men and LGBT activists (some with the same people as seven years earlier), focusing on their personal explications of freedom. Freedom means respect for the other. In our conditions … [pauses] Actually, no one’s freedom means: ‘You can do as you please’. No one’s. And especially not for us who want to be free in this society. People try to find any little blemish on us gays … In the conditions of the Montenegrin society, I think we have space to be free, very much so. But not to do as we wish. What do I mean by this? It doesn’t mean we should not express ourselves. It means that, if we decide to be free in this particular moment of the development of the consciousness of this society, we then have a responsibility to behave decently [pristojno]. This does not mean we should not express our emotions. Go ahead, kiss, hold hands, have a normal intimate relationship with your boyfriend or girlfriend. That is all fine. But we cannot behave arrogantly [bahato]. We need to pay attention to what we are doing. With these words, Mirko eloquently summarised a concept of freedom that circulates among LGBT people in Podgorica – according to which freedom is not so much about choosing what you wish, but about navigating social relations in a way that enables you to stay true to yourself and is simultaneously respectful of others. I am calling this ‘non-autological freedom’ in order to differentiate it from the autological freedom understood as the freedom of an ideal liberal, individualised subject who makes their decisions as they wish, independently from social obligations. Autological freedom is a fiction – an ideal-type model that does not exist in most (or perhaps any) social contexts but that still strongly shapes people’s imaginations, hopes and practices. In Povinelli’s reading, ‘autology’ and ‘genealogy’ are dominant forms of discipline in liberalism that exert particularly strong effects in settler (post)colonies. The same disciplinary pair operated in postsocialist Montenegro, where freedoms of LGBT people have been used by EU observers as an indicator of ‘European progress’ of the whole country away from socialist and Balkan traditions and towards ‘European values’ (Kalezić and Brković 2016; Vuković and Petričević 2019). LGBT activism has been an exemplary locus of the ‘European disciplining’ of the whole Balkans/Southeast Europe (Bilić 2016, 2016; Slootmaeckers 2019). Yet, the effects of the process of ‘European disciplining’ cannot be captured through the opposition between freedom and obligation, or discourses of autology and genealogy. The particular reorganisation of inclusion and exclusion (cf. Dzenovska 2018) that occurred through the LGBT activism in Montenegro made my interlocutors neither as free, nor as oppressed as they may seem in the liberal discursive practices of autology and genealogy. The fact that the Law on Same-Sex Partnerships was adopted in 2020 by the Montenegrin Parliament and that Pride Parades have been successfully organised eight years in a row would suggest a relatively high level of freedom and visibility for LGBT people in the country. Yet, the thorny issue for many of my LGBT friends in Podgorica is that Montenegro Pride usually attracts very few LGBT people from Montenegro. In the five Montenegro Prides in which I took part, most of the 200–300 participants were LGBT activists from across the ex-Yugoslav region, representatives of state and public institutions, EU and foreign embassies, and LGBT tourists who happened to be in Podgorica on that day. The handful of local LGBT people came to the Montenegro Pride mostly as volunteers or wore face masks in order to disguise themselves. Similarly, there is a certain anxiety that, even though the Law on Same-Sex Partnership was adopted in 2020, local gay people will not use it to form legal same-sex partnerships for various reasons. As one of my LGBT activist friends said, ‘We now have a law on “gay marriage”, but we still don’t have an openly gay bar in Podgorica’, illustrating well how uneven social change feels for LGBT people and activists in Montenegro. These sorts of paradoxes, problems and exclusions that ethnographers have noted throughout (South)East Europe (Bilić and Kajinić 2016; Kuhar and Takacs 2007; Kulpa and Mizielinska 2011) are invisible in the discourses of autology and genealogy. They are, however, at the centre of the non-autological understanding of freedom that I could trace among my gay friends in Podgorica. In its non-autological form, freedom means an ability to engage in a certain practice, while thinking-through its conditions and constraints from various positions. It means freedom to be out as a gay person, but under police protection; to organise Pride behind two police cordons; to sleep with the lover in the family house, but not to talk about it openly. Mirko, Ivan and other gay friends of mine from Montenegro did not quite choose the conditions and constraints under which they can engage in these practices. If they could, they would have changed them. Yet, the conditions and constraints did not stop them from engaging in these practices. This ‘unfree freedom’ is not the property of a fictional, individualised, liberated subject who can make autonomous choices, but an act of deliberating on how to move through the knot of social relations and obligations that is either done collectively as an actual conversation, or by engaging in imaginative identification with others. I recently moved to this skyscraper. It has 85 apartments. Everybody knows who I am … I don’t have a problem with anyone because I live like everyone else. If I started to make a circus, to throw parties every night, to leave trash in the elevator, then I would definitely have problems – and people would say this is because I am gay. They will say: ‘Look at this faggot.’ Here, Mirko explained that he made his judgements regarding how to behave as a resident of the building by attending to other people’s points of view. Mirko agreed with my remark that defining bahatost in this way means that he has to carry a heavier ‘mental load’ – that is, to engage in more of what David Graeber (2012) calls interpretive labour – than most straight or bisexual people in Podgorica. He added that: ‘Others have a luxury to snap [when they are annoyed by what others are doing] and to say “What are you doing?!” I don’t, because then I would be a “crazy faggot”.’ That Mirko saw ‘snapping’ when annoyed as a luxury of others reflects a sense of inequality of interpretive labour that will be discussed later. Nikola and Ivan also engaged in imaginative identification with their parents on a regular level. They regularly put themselves into their parents’ shoes, trying to figure out how (not) to act in order to prevent their parents from feeling embarrassed or offended. This was the key aspect to the reflexive relationality they engaged in. Nikola even claimed he did not want to talk with his mother about his sexuality because of her weak heart – as if the very fact he was gay could physically hurt her. Similarly, Ivan said he did not want to kiss Nikola in front of the parents out of consideration for their feelings. Ivan was afraid of endangering the delicate social balance they established. At any given moment, he could have initiated a conversation with his parents – and there were periods when he was close to doing this. Yet, he always refrained from speaking openly. The transparent closet seemed to be good enough – not quite what they would have chosen, but it offered more intimacy from what they may have gotten otherwise, if they decided to ignore the perspective of the parents. Stated briefly, non-autological freedom is not about choosing the kind of self one wants to be, but about figuring out how to navigate social relations in a way that would allow one to do what one wants, while engaging in imaginative identification and deliberation with others. Importantly, ‘behaving nicely’ (pristojno) in the case of LGBT people from Podgorica often means withholding oneself from ‘snapping’ at heteronormativity, homophobia and/or transphobia. With this emphasis on the imaginative identification with others, non-autological freedom of my interlocutors resembles Polanyi’s (2018 [1927]) emancipatory and progressive concept of ‘social freedom’ – with the caveat that it is not distributed equally, as social freedom is supposed to be. Importantly, non-autological freedom does not describe an incomplete version of ‘true freedom’; this is not a step in the development towards full-fledged personal freedom of an autonomous, liberated subject. Instead, this is a qualitatively different way of understanding what it means to be free. Let us take a brief look in what way non-autological freedom can help us conceive of freedom as an anthropological concept. Non-autological forms of freedom point to the need to examine the notion of ‘choice’ in anthropological studies of morality. In the autological imaginary, freedom can exist only in relationship to an individualised subject. The individualised subject exerts freedom by choosing which particular project of carving oneself into a moral person to pursue. The subject exists autonomously, prior to social relations and choices they make and through which they are made. This set of assumptions can be found in Jarrett Zigon’s (2007) theoretical framework. Zigon suggests that in the moments of a moral breakdown persons step away from one mode of being-in-the-world, they reason through the available options and make choices about which ethical system is the most appropriate for them to follow. Here, the freedom to choose leads to the ‘move back into the world’; it allows the choosing subject ‘to once again dwell in the unreflective comfort of the familiar’ (Zigon 2007: 138). The chosen moral path can be an assemblage of multiple ethical systems. For instance, as Zigon (2011) ethnographically demonstrates, the project of remaking moral personhoods in Russian Orthodox drug rehabilitation programmes was simultaneously shaped by discursive practices of Russian Orthodox Christianity, Soviet legacies and neoliberalism. An assemblage or not, the chosen moral system is still single and the choice takes place once – during the radical moral breakdown.44 In his more recent work, Zigon (2018) offers a notion of ‘disclosive freedom’ as ‘the condition of open potentiality that makes possible both humans and nonhumans alike; a condition, that is, that allows these beings always to be in a process of becoming’. Disclosive freedom is a precondition for the existence of all beings, human and nonhuman, that can be protected or negated by the practices of humans. Therefore, Zigon discusses how freedom becomes restricted, rather than how it is pursued and practised. In this view, in the moment of moral breakdown, there is an autonomous, individualised self – not unlike an autological subject – who retracts from the world, thinks-through the available options, and chooses the new, single moral system to follow. I offer a different way of thinking about freedom. It is not simply that the word ‘choice’ carries problematic connotations when you write about gay people. It is more that we need a relational imaginary when thinking about freedom. Non-autological freedom does not entail choosing the kind of self that one wants to be – as if possible selves are given in advance. It rather involves investing imaginative identification to figure out how to move through social relations (that produce one as a particular self along the way).55 I draw inspiration here from Butler (1993), who helps us to think critically about the figure of a ‘choosing subject’. For Butler (1993: x), it is wrong to assume a wilful and instrumental subject who ‘woke in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night’. Yet, this does not mean gender is imposed on the subject in advance. The subject is produced through everyday repetition of gender norms, while at the same time the subject produces (and has a limited ability to challenge and reshape) gender norms. Here, I should mention that, following Butler (1993), my assumption is that personhood is a relational category and that a person does not exist separately from, or prior to, the social relations and everyday practices that they engage in. It is through relations, enacted by everyday practices, that personhood is worked out, just as
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