Enforced invisibility and the production of monstrosity: Pajtim Statovci’s Bolla

Abstract

This article reads Pajtim Statovci’s Bolla (2019; trans. 2021) as a mythologically structured exploration of enforced invisibility and the politics of the gaze in late-Yugoslav and post-war Kosovo. Moving beyond the surface narrative of a forbidden queer relationship between an Albanian and a Serb, it argues that the Albanian Bolla myth functions as the novel’s organizing principle rather than a decorative metaphor. Arsim is read as a Bolla-like subject whose ethnic marginalization, heteronormative regulation, and self-closeting generate an escalating “becoming-monstrous” whose rare moments of visibility are catastrophic instead of emancipatory. Drawing on Sartre, Foucault, Fanon, Mulvey, and Sedgwick, the article reconstructs a theoretical architecture of the gaze and re-reads the folklore’s internal logic through close analysis of key scenes. It argues that Bolla shows Balkan nationalist and heteronormative regimes to be producing the monstrosities they themselves cast as deviant and threatening.