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1981
Volume 11, Issue 1
  • ISSN: 2052-3971
  • E-ISSN: 2052-398X

Abstract

This article focuses on the affective circulation of knowledge about gender-based violence in order to interrogate the effects of injurious stereotypes, such as female vulnerability/masculine power as well as emancipatory fantasies of the good life, reproduced in the name of acting against violence. In a pandemic context, permeated by the psychological impact of domestic confinement on the population and the intensification of policing and securitization, which helped evoke liberal fantasies of heteronormative family structures, care and comfort that concealed the reality of as spaces haunted by the threat of violence, and amidst the Greek MeToo campaign and the continuing proliferation of news reports on battered women and femicides, I ask the following: How do particular forms of knowledge turn into urgent matters and mediate the (im)possibility of making sense of the gendered effects of violence? Moreover, how does knowledge about violence reproduce the effects of violence and thus ‘burns out’ those involved in this field? Or, what makes gender-based violence so resilient despite the actual ‘noise’ that knowledge about it makes? Relying on interviews conducted with lawyers, activists, psychologists and caretakers that reflect feelings of anger, exhaustion, self-annulment and disempowerment due to a caring economy devoid of the necessary infrastructures, this article attempts to unravel the affective atmosphere of ‘burning issues’ in relation to both givers and recipients of care entangled in the temporal webs of waiting, delays and impasses that are induced by the socio-legal structures ostensibly providing care and protection while ending up reproducing multiple burnouts: from victimhood to depletion of strength and energy to act. This context, I argue, forces us to consider such issues from a perspective of social (rather than criminal) justice and interrogate what I call the cruel temporalities at work when the urgency of action and its biopolitical effects might also burn the possibility to demand social justice differently in a neo-liberal and increasingly neo-conservative context.

Funding
This study was supported by the:
  • Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation’s (Award 4809)
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2025-06-30
2026-04-21

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/content/journals/10.1386/jgmc_00103_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): care; COVID-19; crisis; Greek MeToo; resilience; social justice; vulnerability

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