While the shackles of austerity continue to shatter the remnants of once dignified, and now, mostly dehumanising lives, for most Greeks who have suffered decades long of economic and social crises, ...the rapid rise of the far right and its incipient racist and xenophobic discourse has had a profound impact on the country. This paper attempts a twofold objective: on the one hand to contribute to the global feminist dialogue by making visible and vocal the case of Greece, and, on the other to advance a plea for a current consciousness raising era in Greece as regards particularly contemporary youth who can transform instances of despair into action and social change by adopting feminist principles in their everyday lives. I draw on the representational politics of far-right fascist discourse and individual behaviour articulated and depicted in contemporary Greek films, and its gendered and xenophobic normalisers, to contextualise an interdisciplinary feminist analysis of such phenomena in contemporary Greece.
Resilient necrocapitalism and the zombie genre of representations of current dystopias are persistent in their political purpose in producing changes in the social order to benefit plutocracies ...around the world. It is through a thanatopolitical lens that we should view the successive losses of life, and this zombie genre has come to represent a dystopia that, for political purposes, is intended to produce changes in societies which have tolerated the violent deaths of women. This article focuses on contemporary Greece and proposes a theoretical framework where femicide is understood as a social phenomenon that reflects a global gendered necropolitical logic which equals genocide. Such theoretical assemblages have to be situated within intersectional imperatives and tacitly as the result of the capitalist terror state performed in an expansive and direct immediate death, exacerbated by the lingering slow social death of the welfare state. The article contends that the scripted hetero-patriarchal social order of the necrocapitalist state poses a unique political threat to societies. With the silence of the complicity of the state, what is necessary is the creation and spread of new political knowledge and new social movements as resilient political tactics of resistance. This article foregrounds an ecofeminist perspective on these issues and considers ways through which new pedagogies of hope can counter the gendered necropolitics of contemporary capitalism in Greece.
Despite the increasingly diverse societal landscape in Greece for more than three decades within a context of migration, understandings of its fragile histories are still limited in shaping a sense ...of belonging that is open to ‘otherness’. While Greek communities have utilised history as a pathway to maintain identity, other parallel histories and understandings do not resonate with ‘Greekness’ for most, such as the case of Greek Jewry. Critical historical perspectives can benefit from tracing ‘re-membering’ as a feminist practice in the reassessment of societal values of inclusivity. Histories of violence and injustice can also include elements of ‘difficult histories’ and must be embraced to seek acknowledgement of these in promoting social change and cultural analysis for public humanities informing curation and curricula. Between eduscapes, art heritage spaces, an entry into contested and conflictual histories can expand a sense of belonging and the way we imagine our own connected histories with communities, place and nation. Greek Jews do not constitute a strong part of historical memory for Greeks in their past and present; in contrast to what is perceived as ‘official’ history, theirs is quite marginal. As a result, contemporary Greeks, from everyday life to academia, do not have a holistic understanding in relation to the identities of Jews in Greece, their culture or the Holocaust. Given the emergence of a new wave of artistic activism in recent years in response to the ever-increasing dominance of authoritarian neoliberalism, along with activist practices in the art field as undercurrents of resistance, in this intervention I bring together bodies of works to create a dialogic reflection with historical, artistic and feminist sources. In turn, the discussion then explores the spatiotemporal contestations of the historical geographies of Holocaust monuments in Greece. While interrogating historical amnesia, I endeavour to provide a space to engage with ‘difficult histories’ in their aesthetic context as a heritage of healing and social justice.
This article draws on qualitative research in Basel, Switzerland with highly skilled migrant women from various European nationalities employed in a number of professional sectors. It seeks to ...contribute to the literatures on the sociologies of migration and the sociologies of everyday life by intersecting the conceptual frame of ‘affective habitus’ with the phenomenology of material culture in unpacking how emotions triggered by objects shape settling practices in host societies. The analysis centres on pathways of cultural production as they unfold through memories, objects and experiential return visits. The authors find sociological depth in applying ‘affective habitus’ as the conceptual framing to examine how mediations of memory and emotions can extend understandings of how women migrants create agentic ways to settle in new host societies while making cultural accommodations. The conceptual terrain of ‘affective habitus’ is theorised through a phenomenological approach to gendered migrancy and cultural materiality in everyday life.
Just as masculinity is crucial in the construction of nationhood, masculinity is also significant in the making and unmaking of transnational communities. This article focuses on how black African ...men negotiate and perform respectable masculinity in transnational settings, such as the workplace, community, and family. Moving away from conceptualizations of black transnational forms of masculinities as in perpetual crisis and drawing on qualitative data collected from the members of the new African diaspora in London, the article explores the diverse ways notions of masculinity and gender identities are being challenged, reaffirmed, and reconfigured. The article argues that men experience a loss of status as breadwinners and a rupture of their sense of masculine identity in the reconstruction of life in the diaspora. Conditions in the hostland, in particular, women’s breadwinner status and the changing gender relations, threaten men’s “hegemonic masculinity” and consequently force men to negotiate respectable forms of masculinity.
...this special issue incorporates critical, theoretically informed, and empirically grounded contributions that explore diverse approaches, case studies, conceptual framings, critiques, ...deconstructions, and discourses of gendered violence and society in an interdisciplinary manner. In examining gendered violence, society, and social justice, contributors reflect the diversity and complexity of concepts through contributions that seek to problematize, deconstruct, dismantle, critique, subvert, contest, and articulate phenomena of gendered violence through robust feminist and intersectional analyses as they also focus on marginalized voices and excluded groups. Instances of private-public negotiations of black family structures and intimate partner violence against black women in Jim Crow Houston factor as the backdrop for David Ponton III to elucidate the historical experiential narratives of intimate social geographies of sexual vulnerabilities, victimization, and powerlessness for victims of rape and domestic violence. ...Henry draws our attention to digital communication technologies and their role in both facilitating and exposing gendered violence.
In this article, we explore the ways language has been used in Cyprus during different historical periods as a means of a dividing power, with the use of Cypriot dialects as a form of resistance and ...reunification of the island. We situate these translanguaging themes within a context of affective biopolitics that impacts Cypriot generations in shaping their everyday life through borderscapes and nationalisms. More specifically, we first examine how the official languages of the island (Greek and Turkish) have been used in the dominant public sphere(s) of Cyprus to marginalise Cypriot dialects, which, in turn, have been used as an oral means of communication, but also to impose symbolic signifiers of the biopolitics of borders and nationalisms in dividing communities. Secondly, we explore ways in which Cypriot dialects have been used as forms of linguistic resistance to nationalism, offering an alternative collective identity for generations of both communities, even during periods when nationalism was dominant in both communities. The translanguaging exploration centres on a close discourse analysis of one particular radio programme—the ‘Cypriot radio sketch’—that has been very popular among Cypriots since the appearance of radio in Cyprus in 1953. Finally, we analytically and discursively contextualise attempts of revival of the Cypriot dialects by younger generations as communicative forms of resistance to powers of partition, as well as translanguaging pathways to actualise their desire for the reunification of the island. We eclectically draw on a multi-method approach to combine datasets from interviews, media and social media while combining critical discourse analysis to theorise the affordances, borderscapes and affective biopolitics of generational language use within geographies of nationalism and resistance in the borderscapes of a divided Cyprus.
'Classics in Hong Kong' is not a phrase one comes across on a regular basis, so when I was asked to write this article on my experiences of teaching Classics in Hong Kong specifically and my ...perspective on Classics in Asia generally, Iￂ was delighted at the opportunity. Iￂ joined The Independent Schools Foundation Academy (The ISF Academy, Hong Kong) just over two years ago, having studied, trained and taught Classics in London previously. When the prospect arose of teaching the subject I love on the other side of the globe, it was an offer I could not refuse, out of curiosity if nothing else! Although my teaching experiences on my Asian adventure thus far have been quite different and often unfamiliar, I still passionately believe that Classics is equally important everywhere: appreciating the achievements of the ancients; questioning human nature and the world we live in; and learning from heroes and villains, mortals and immortals. After all, the Ancient Greeks and Romans played an important role both in the West and the East, with interaction between the civilisations across the ages; Alexander the Great's empire is of course one such example of the mutual intellectual, political and economic exchange between the western and eastern worlds.
•Offers gendered insights into contemporary tourism mobilities.•Mobile professional women hosting practices reflects a laboratory of sociality.•Culture, intimacy and identity are social practices ...among hosts and guests.•VFR mobilities enable global care arrangements.
By giving voice to highly-skilled mobile professional women who have relocated to Switzerland from various European countries, representing different nationalities, duration of migration and family circumstances, we shed light on the experiences of hosting – an under-researched segment of Visiting Friends and Relatives (VFR) mobilities. Our findings reveal a threefold investigation to sociality, tourism and mobility, by drawing on empirical insights to three angles: that of, culture, intimacy and identity as pathways to transformative social practices among hosts and guests. Highly-skilled mobile professional women’s hosting practices reflect a laboratory of sociality whereupon relations of closeness and proximity are tested under new conditions of social and private life in the new destination country.
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