Asja Bakić’s Feminist Weird Fiction

Born in Bosnia in 1982, Asja Bakić now lives in Croatia, and publishes both in Croatia and Serbia. A member of a new generation of Balkan and post-Yugoslav writers, Bakić is not only poet and essayist, but also gained international success with her short story collection Mars (2015), which has been translated into English, German, and French. Bakić’s playful poetry, feminist polemical essays, and her genre-bending short stories position her as a subversive author in Croatian literature where neorealist poetics is still dominant. In contrast, Bakić’s short stories can best be described as “weird fiction” or “the New Weird”, a self-reflexive and politically charged form of writing that blurs the boundaries between fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Her stories are generally set in the future and feature combative and persistent androgynous narrator-protagonists, mostly young women from the Balkans, who expose the ways in which sexism intersects with capitalism, colonialism, technology, and climate change. Bakić’s stories bring together feminist ideas and “weird fiction” to illustrate how “female troublemakers”, “feminist killjoys”, and “willful subjects” (S. Ahmed) – theoretical and political figures which refuse to happily accept the position society has intended for them – can act as the “glitch” (L. Russell) that opens up new possibilities of living and being by exposing the failures of the current system.