Sex/gender conservatively, progressively, and in-between: The politics of ambiguity in Pajtim Statovci’s My Cat Yugoslavia

<ns3:p> This paper examines the formal ways in which textual ambiguity can lead to differing and legitimate readings concerning sex/gender (Fausto-Sterling 2012) as a political issue. Pajtim Statovci’s novel <ns3:italic>My Cat Yugoslavia</ns3:italic> (2017 [2014]) tells the story of Bekim, whose parents moved the family from Kosovo to Finland in the 1990s due to war. The story is narrated by Bekim and his mother Emine in turn, which, I argue, is a structural dialogism that destabilizes each of the narrators’ perspectives. Bekim desires men, which, in the conservative milieu of Albanian Kosovo, is almost unimaginable, although Bekim is now a Finn, albeit marked by in-betweenness. As such, Bekim’s initial description of the male sexual act shapes the way in which his mother’s description of her marriage in Kosovo in the 1980s is read. I argue that this layered narration is a method of destabilizing gendered and sexual norms and questioning the political import of ‘categorical’ and ‘practical’ identities (Hogan 2018). Furthermore, I suggest that the ambiguity concerning sex/gender resulting from the alternating narrative form allows for, and in fact invites, various readings based on the political positioning of the flesh-and-blood reader. As such, textual ambiguity allows for both ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ readings of sex/gender in the novel and the ambiguity can be termed a narrative gap (Caracciolo and Guédon 2017; Iser 1978) that is filled in by readers. I also argue that the issue of Bekim’s ambiguous sex/gender positioning can be extended to highlight the consequential yet perhaps less-emphasized positioning of Emine as a woman. <ns3:italic>My Cat Yugoslavia</ns3:italic> is not only an intervention in queer politics, but also in the politics of feminism and migration. </ns3:p>