Yugoslav transgendered heroes: “Virgina” and ” Marble Ass”
Yugoslav transgendered heroes: “Virgina” and ” Marble Ass”

Summary/Abstract: Two films from Yugoslavia in the early 90s feature transgendered heroes/heroines: Srdjan Karanović’s Virgina (Virdžina, 1992), about a girl raised as a boy in the early 1900s, and Želimir Žilnik’s Marble Ass (Dupe od mramora, 1994), about a transvestite prostitute in contemporary Beograd. Marjorie Garber argues that the presence of a transvestite in a text “indicates a category crisis elsewhere.” One need not look far for such a crisis in Yugoslavia at the time, and if, as Garber writes, transvestism is “the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself,” how do Karanović and Žilnik use the transvestite figures in the films to destabilize other categories?

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