Destroying Men, Destroying Masculinity: Queer Death in Brane Mozetič’s Passion

The article examines Brane Mozetič’s Pasijon (Passion), a seminal work of Slovene queer literature, through antisocial queer theory and queer death studies. It shows how the stories from the collection construct masculinity as violent and destructive while reworking death into a queer site of both subversion and repetition. Stories such as “The Mayor,” “Rape,” and “Soldiers” deploy a poetics of inversion, where victims become perpetrators, Eucharistic sacrifice is rewritten through queer martyrdom, and militarized masculinities collapse under erotic desire. Situated in the early post-socialist Slovene context, Pasijon appears as a radical disruption of heteronormativity, collapsing boundaries between life and death, desire and violence. Yet this antisocial queer politics also risks reproducing the very structures of male violence it resists, exposing the ambivalence of queer literary beginnings in Slovenia. Ultimately, the article argues that Mozetič’s text negotiates resistance and complicity, rupture and continuity, in the politics of masculinity and death.