Nationalism, Masculinity and Multicultural Citizenship in Serbia à Jessica Greenberg Since the 5 October revolution that formally ushered Serbia into a democratic era, poli- tical commentators, scholars, civic activists and others have watched the country for signs of resurgent nationalism. 1 Many perceived the primary threat to the new demo- cratic order as the persistence of nationalism, particularly in the years after the 2003 assassination of Zoran Djindjic ´. Such nationalism, forged in the 1980s and 1990s, was subject to eruptions among unsavory politicians, pensioners, Mafiosi and denizens of Belgrade’s suburbs and Serbia’s “backward” countryside. The problem underlying this model of resurgent nationalism is that it assumes, and simultaneously constructs, nationalism as a static and unchanging arrangement of ideological and social factors that flare up and die down in response to political stimuli—the arrest of indicted war criminals, the outrageous rhetoric of populist politicians, negotiations over the status of Kosovo, or high-stakes sporting events. While there is no question that such events create discursive space for nationalist, sexist and racist agendas, the flare-up model presents a dangerous simplification of how nationalisms work. In this article, I argue that nationalist forms draw on a multitude of contemporary social categories and relations, making nationalism less a regressive backlash, and more a malleable social response to changing conditions. I consider nationalism, like nation, a “category of practice” that “can come to structure perception, to inform thought and experience, to organize discourse and political action.” 2 Further- more, we should not mistake the similarity that forms of nationalist expression take for a continuity in people’s experience of what nationalism means. As Katherine Verdery and Michael Burawoy have argued in examining post-socialist forms, “what looks familiar has causes that are fairly novel” and “people’s responses to a situation may often appear as holdovers precisely because they employ a language and symbols adapted from a previous order.” 3 It is no less true that we need to be attentive to novel causes underlying the circulation of nationalist forms in contemporary Serbia by looking to the social, political and economic contexts in and through which people are articulating nationalist projects. More specifically, I use the analytic lens of masculinity to argue that recent anti-gay nationalist practice and rhetoric must be understood in terms of the specific transform- ation of categories of political and social belonging in Serbia. As others have argued, nationalist masculinity is a resource that people in Serbia, and other post-socialist Nationalities Papers, Vol. 34, No. 3, July 2006 ISSN 0090-5992 print; ISSN 1465-3923 online/06/030321-21 # 2006 Association for the Study of Nationalities DOI: 10.1080/00905990600766628