A queer tradition: "Sworn Virgin" at the intersection of europe, the balkans and transgender visibility

What might happen when the encounter which poses a structural threat to heteronormativity is precisely the encounter with tradition? Sworn Virgin ( Virgine Giurata ) , Laura Bispuri's 2015 debut feature film, disrupts the narrative of binary gender at its point of intersection with that of a binary Europe. Moving from Albania to Italy, the film moves perilously close to a balkanist narrative of an economically and culturally backward Eastern Europe and a prosperous and open-minded West. Depicting the experience of a biologically female person who lives as a man, and who experiences reconciliation with femininity, the film is also in danger of generating a heteronormative narrative of transgender experience and identity. Always at risk of a lapse into the reinforcement of stereotype and normativity, both Bispuri's film and its source, Elvira Dones' 2007 novel, queer the representation of the Balkan emigre experience. My paper draws on parallel narratives of compromise and recognition by Sara Ahmed (2009) and Ivaylo Dichev (2016). Ahmed comments that for queers, the price of recognition may be the approximation of straight, normative social forms that inherently preclude the very possibility of being queer. Dichev describes the post-1989 Balkans as embarked upon the 'quest, impossible from the beginning, for a European recognition', and this search for 'recognition' involves an interplay of defiance, compromise and conformity that very closely resembles that outlined by Ahmed. Sworn Virgin 's central character Hana, also known as Mark, has an identity which includes, but is by no means limited to, the categories of Balkan and Queer. T he film depicts an experience of self-discovery, set in a European city whose people are almost impossibly welcoming and non-judgemental. I discuss the significance of this alteration from the novel's setting in the United States, and suggest that the addition of European context generates the possibil ity , and risk, of t aking Hana's trajectory as a basis for queering Europeanisation.