Guest Lecture | Adriana Zaharijević (Belgrad) | Anti-Gender Mobilisations in Post-Yugoslav Space

This public talk examines the diverse forms of anti-gender mobilization across the post-Yugoslav region, tracing their historical roots, cultural particularities, and religious underpinnings. Through a comparative analysis of seven post-socialist countries that once shared a common Yugoslav past – now divided by war and divergent paths toward "Europeanization" – the lecture reveals how contemporary ultraconservative actors frame their agendas using the language of rights to pursue illiberal aims. While gender scholars and activists have long vollaborated across newly drawn borders in defense of human rights and against rising nationalisms, they now face a paradox: their fiercest adversaries are likewise transnational, coordinated, and ideologically unified in their portrayal of "gender" as a central threat.

This talk explores how gender has become a potent "sympolic glue" for post-Yugoslav ultraconservative forces and offers critical insights for scholars, activists, and policymakers working to understand and resist anti-gender movements in the region.

The talk is based on a forthcoming edited volume on anti-gender mobilizations in the post-Yugoslav space, co-edited with Roman Kuhar from the University of Ljubljana, to be published by Palgrave in October 2025.

Adriana Zaharijević is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. Her work combines political philosophy, feminist theory and social history. She is the author of four monographs (in Serbian) Becoming a Woman (2010), Who Is an Individual? (2014, 2019), Life of Bodies (2020), and Judith Butler and Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Her texts have been translated into Albanian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, and Ukrainian, and she has actively translated feminist theory and philosophy into Serbian for two decades. She regularly writes short pieces for a wider public, in which she tackles social inequalities, antinationalism and antimilitarism. Adriana is the 2022 Emma Goldman Snowball awardee.