"Goodbye Serbian Kennedy": Zoran Đinđić and the new democratic masculinity in Serbia

In this article, the author demonstrates how representations of the assassination and funeral of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Din cross d sign ić enacted 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 Zoran Din cross d sign ić represented 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 non-reproductive, 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 about Din cross d sign ić and his killers as certain kinds of men, rather than about structural features of politics and government.