Carna Brkovic

CARNA BRKOVIC, Georg-August University, Gottigen, Germany, received an Engaged Research Grant to assist “SHARED FREEDOM: Collective Moral Deliberation in LGBTIQ Activism in Montenegro.” Within the framework of the research project “Shared Freedom”, the grantee studied how trans people in Podgorica, Montenegro, pursue what they perceive as freedom and is now working on developing an understanding of freedom as “shared,” meaning as an ability for an individual to choose how to respond to others around them and so affect the kind of the world they work towards. The concept of “freedom” can possess greater analytical strength when understood as a capacity for responsiveness to other living beings and the surrounding world. The project resulted in a collaborative and experimental ethnographic film called “Trans magic”. The research confirmed the assumption that fortune-tellers and religious actors play a major role in the moral reasoning that happens after the coming out in many families in Montenegro. Practically every LGBT person we spoke to has had an experience of having to accompany their parents and older siblings to a local fortune teller, a priest, or a hodža. Another insight gained through this research that is relevant for the partners is the importance of animals for the creation and maintenance of families and households, as well as for healing and self-care. The project has also raised the question of how to think about transness and trans liberation in a region that had its own form of traditional third sex/third gender before socialist modernization (“sworn virgin”, ostajnica, burrnesha). It suggests that cultural anthropological works on gender and decolonization need to consider complex interplays between cultural and economic frameworks.