Homosexuality, Queer and Marxism: An historical survey and a view from the (post)Yugoslav perspective

Abstract

The complex relationship between Queer and Marxism, and the related concepts of gender and class, opression and exploatation, is the question that gets raised time and again within progressive theories and movements. Which one has the priority? Or, is the priority issue totally wrong, and one needs to answer instead how these concepts mutually condition each other? The answers to these questions also depend on how we conceive the multiple histories of Queer Marxism. Therefore, this essay is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the history of Queer Marxism in the West. The corpus of works upon which this segment is based involves so far dominant approaches to this history and works by authors like Mario Mieli and Guy Hocquenghem from the second half of the 20th century, as well as the writings by one of the founders of Queer Marxism, Peter Drucker, from the last decade. The second part focuses on the present-day decolonial perspectives on Queer Marxist history in the making, and in particular, previous studies of homosexual history from the Yugoslav socialist period. In the end, we provide a brief sketch of the field of post-Yugoslav Queer Marxism in the making.