Shifty Serb

Testicles are a national symbol, a trademark of the race; other peoples have luck, tradition, erudition, history, reason— but we alone have balls.

—Danilo Kis

This quote stuck with me for years after I read it. When reading Stanger’s Supper last week and writing about the effects of patriarchy on women’s lives in Montenegro, I remembered it again, and to my delight - it was the opening quote of a piece from Balkan as a Metaphor!

The essay titled Sexualizing the Serb by Dusan Bjelic and Lucinda Cole analyzes the meaning of sexual identity in social and political discourse and points to the dangerous influence of external stereotyping on the Serbian male on the internal national identity formation. Analyzing first the arguments from philosophy, psychology, and popular culture, and drawing heavily on Maria Todorova, they try to answer one interesting question - if balls have truly become the “trademark of the race” what were the conditions that made this possible?

The image of the Balkan male in most literature and public discourse is that of “uncivilized, cruel, crude, primitive, and disheveled.” As she describes three men on Korcula, Rebecca West writes in Black Lamb and Gray Falcon:

“These were men. They could beget children on women, they could shape certain kinds of materials for their purposes that made them masters of their worlds.”

Bjelic and Cole use this example to show how the Slavic male identity was formed in opposition to the modern, Western male. While this description provided by West might initially seem positive, looking at the whole paragraph taken in the overall context of her book, the “Slav virility” turns out to be predicated mostly on absence of industry, technology, government, art, culture. It is clear that by the end of the First World War, Balkan men were associated with a brutal sexuality, while other Europeans (Northern in particular) were portrayed as capable of more complex psychological responses in times of war and extreme violence, and were not turning to sexuality to establish their power. In this sense, Bjelic and Cole argue, “in the absence of anything but the the most formulaic and “primitivizing” evidence about the Balkans and sexuality, the region easily serves as a screen for all kinds of fantasmatic projections from the West which, in turn become part of the fodder for Serbian identity formation.”

By the end of the most recent Balkan conflicts in the 90s, the South Slavic “sexual cruelty” became tightly linked to Serbian male. Wartime rape became tightly connected with Serbian male libido. This is a particularly difficult situation for generations of men who were born slightly before or during the conflict. Their idea of masculinity and national identity are tightly connected to violence and the external portrayal of their “maleness.” The base of the male identity is still predominantly resting on toxic masculinity, nationalism, and need for violence to show strength, exert power and to establish independence.

I spoke about this with a Serbian friend from New York today:

Guys at work often make jokes about me being a “shifty Serb” but in reality, I am not sure they are only joking. I noticed recently that they are not being entirely transparent with me, and I wonder if they truly worry about my “shiftiness.”

This is just one example from diaspora, but what about all the men living in the Balkans now who feel inadequate because they do not have jobs, houses, cars, and money to support their families? What about those who see joining a gang or a nationalist party as the only way to be and become a “man?” The "shiftiness" remains to be one of the main requirements for survival in the Balkans, and as long as there is "necessity" for it, questioning toxic masculinity and sexual and gender identity formation remains an incredibly difficult endeavor.