“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”: Zoran Đinđić and the New Democratic Masculinity in Serbia
"Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”: Zoran Đinđić and the New Democratic Masculinity in Serbia

Summary/Abstract: In this article, the author demonstrates how representations of the assassination and funeral of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić enacted politics, reshaping the relationship between citizen and state during a time of political crisis. The expression of citizen-state relations through public mourning grounded in intimate, familial loss produced a break between a violent, nationalist past and a possible democratic future. This process relied on the deployment of normative assumptions about gender and kinship. The figure of Zoran Đinđić represented a heteronormative, democratic masculinity that evoked a new relationship between family, citizen, state, and nation in the Serbian context. In contrast, those held responsible for his assassination were presented as antifamily and part of a clan structure based on nonreproductive, criminal connections that evoked a contrasting and undemocratic form of masculinity. Such representations masked ways that current political institutions and public figures were implicated in past state violence by focusing on a story about Đinđić and his killers as certain kinds of men, rather than about structural features of politics and government.

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