ABSTRACT
Two films from Yugoslavia in the early 1990s feature transgendered heroes/heroines: Srđan Karanović’s Virgina (Virdžina, 1992), about a girl raised as a boy in the early 1900s, and Želimir Žilnik’s Marble Ass (Dupe od mramora, 1994), about a transvestite prostitute in contemporary Belgrade. Marjorie Garber argues that the presence of a transvestite in a text “indicates a category crisis elsewhere” (Garber, 1993, p. 7). One need not look far for such a crisis in Yugoslavia at the time, and if, as Garber writes, transvestism is “the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself” (Garber, 1993, p. 17), how do Karanović and Žilnik use the transvestite figures in the films to destabilize other categories?
