Against the 'New Janissaries': Anti-Gender Ideology Media Activism in Serbia

Abstract

The paper analyzes recent activism in the digital sphere by representatives of the new Serbian right, a group of conservative intellectuals with a self-appointed role in what they explicitly call the “culture wars” and particularly engaged in attacks on “gender ideology”. Data gathered from posts, articles, journalistic pieces, and statements in podcasts, in which various aspects of gender and sexuality are tackled will be analyzed using the tools of Civil Sphere Theory. CST seems particularly helpful in this case because these actors and their discourse entertain a multiply ambiguous relation to the idea of “civility”, of which several aspects will be discussed. The first aspect concerns the paradox of “uncivil society”, since the new Serbian right speaks from within civil society and urges civil action in the name of cherished values, but their arguments are based on highly un-civil exclusionary categorizations of whole groups of citizens. The second aspect is that they call for civic, non-institutional, even “guerilla” mobilization of citizens, because state institutions are allegedly colonized by foreign interests and their domestic hirelings, while on the other hand these actors themselves almost always occupy positions of institutional power, and their activities often result in institutional change (e.g. changed educational policies). Thirdly, the final irony to be discussed is a curious internationalism of this discourse: while it is obsessively protective of the nation and insists that the Serbian state is held captive to foreign powers, especially the USA, almost all the arguments used are not home-grown but rather copied from this same USA, that is, from the American new right.