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

Abstract

In this article, the author demonstrates how representations of the assassination and funeral of Serbian Prime Minister Zoranëiniclenacted 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 Zoranëiniclrepresented 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 aboutëinicland his killers as certain kinds of men, rather than about structural features of politics and government.