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- Volume 4, Issue 2, 2018
Journal of Greek Media & Culture - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2018
Volume 4, Issue 2, 2018
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Queer subjectivities within political scenes: Traumatic relations, exposed vulnerabilities
More LessThis article examines the lives of queer people as performed in the biographies of ten interlocutors who participated in the queer political scene during the decade 2000–10. In recent years, a wide range of queer/feminist subjectivities, groups and spaces have emerged within collective social movements in Greece. These new approaches to radical feminism and queer life-forms often convey a sense of discontinuity with the recent past, as queer voices have been marginalized in the anti-authoritarian and the radical leftist political scene until recently. I argue that the anti-authoritarian and leftist political space in and around the various social grassroots movements constituted – in their own right – disciplinary fields as well as gender-constructing mechanisms. Gendered subjectivities, either entirely excluded or included on restrictive terms, exposed the limits of the political body. In this article, I explore how these new queer contexts can work through the traumas out of which they have emerged, and I argue that the emergence of a queer political scene in Greece signals a shift from passionate attachments to new modes of relationality. These new modes of relating expose vulnerabilities and emerge as negotiations of intimacy between the self and the other.
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Critically queer and haunted: Greek identity, crisiscapes and doing queer history in the present
More LessHow can one do the history of Modern Greek homosexuality at the present moment, in a country where intersectional precarity, neo-liberal control and proliferating austerity measures ensure that rights and political demands are in jeopardy? How can we historicise the ways in which ethnonationalism and neoconservative rhetoric create a phobic atmosphere, at the very moment when sexual and gender difference become more pronounced and are finally supported by institutional frameworks? This article offers an overview of the major milestones in Greek LGBTQI+ political representation as well as of recent attempts to articulate a Modern Greek queer history. Taking its cue from the shaming campaign against a cross-dressed man found cruising in the outskirts of Athens in 2016 and an analysis of the influential film Strella: A Woman’s Way (2009), it argues that we need to develop a new model of doing queer history in the present. Such a model will be both sensitive to the fluidity and historical challenge of queer emergence, but also remain ready to dwell on long histories of disavowal, institutionalized homophobia and suppression.
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Legal recognition of same-sex partnership as a political claim: Just aporias, critical (im)possibilities
More LessLegal recognition constitutes one of the most topical questions for LGBTQI+ movements and the relative theory. Legal recognition of same-sex partners is construed, for a part of the movement, as a subversive, emancipatory political claim which seeks to ensure a safe legal ground, where the partners will enjoy visibility and rights comparable to those provided to opposite-sex married couples. However, the historicization of partnership recognition, and more specifically of the institution of marriage, reveals its links to ownership, reproduction of the nation, church, gender discrimination, exclusion as well as to the classification of erotic practices, intimacy and relationality. Addressing the Greek context, this article explores the aporetic tensions between the political demand of recognition and its radical potential, on the one hand, and the context (historical, political and social) of the institution of marriage on the other. Is there any justice in inclusion and how should we understand it? Are all the stories of recognition, hence of inclusion and subjection to law, the same? What does law sustain when its idiom expands, for instance in the case of the new Greek civil partnership agreement? Where is the place – if any – of justice and can it be inhabited by law? Is law something that we ‘cannot not want’, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak puts it? Finally, does the position from which these questions are posed matter? The article does not attempt to respond to the dilemmatic question ‘for or against’ legal recognition, but complicates it with analytical tools borrowed from critical theory, feminist and queer theory and Derridean deconstruction.
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Rap in Greece: Gendered configurations of power in-between the rhymes
Authors: Alkisti Efthymiou and Haris StavrakakisHip hop culture in Greece – and especially rap music – seems to be going through a period of bloom. Since 2010, a new generation of Greek-based non-commercial rap artists has surged in popularity, making rhymes and tunes about their everyday experiences (drugs, sex, nightlife, violence, poverty), while self-producing their records and maintaining a critical stance towards mainstream culture and media. In the lyrics of most artists of the genre, misogynist and homophobic assumptions are frequently reproduced, despite the rappers’ expressed militancy against all forms of authority. The article examines this dissonance – created when sexist language is employed in critiques against power – and traces the intersections of gender, sexuality and political resistance within contemporary non-commercial rap in Greece. The authors focus on the produced masculinities and femininities, on the political subjects interpellated by the lyrics and on points of destabilizing regulatory gender norms. More specifically, they highlight the ways in which heteronormative masculinity is reinforced (even) in ‘politically conscious’ Greek-speaking rap and, within the same music genre, we look for its undoing.
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Queering the archive of Greek laments
More LessLament in Greece has been historically linked to notions of cultural continuity and national belonging. As a literary genre or mode of performance, but also as a rhetorical trope, it has had a constitutive role in shaping national identity. Within this ideological context, Greek laments were strategically used by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century folklorists as survivals of an uninterrupted oral tradition, and hence as original proofs of continuity between modern Greeks and their supposed ancestors. Yet, the archives of oral poetry in general were extensively edited – but also partially constructed – by early folklorists in order to serve ideological purposes related to the construction of national identity, and to the promotion of the nation’s image according to Western European notions of Hellenism. Furthermore, it was not unusual for these scholars to create themselves quasi-demotic songs, in the manner and style of oral tradition. This was the case, for instance, of Georgios Tertsetis, whose quasi-demotic song ‘The Fair Retribution’ (H Δικαία Eκδίκησις) raises issues regarding desire between men, but also upon the impossibility of the subjects of such a desire to be mourned and lamented. Departing from an analysis of ‘The Fair Retribution’, and after offering a selective overview of the discourses of early folklorists regarding the use of Greek laments in the nationalist project, this article proceeds with a self-reflexive account of my lecture-performance Poustia kai Ololygmos: Selections from the Occult Songs of the Greek People. Enacting a pseudo-scientific persona, in this performance I announced the fictive discovery of an archive of Greek laments, which addresses issues of queer mourning and desire, while also bringing to the fore the absence of lament when it comes to queer subjectivities, in the past, but also in the present.
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Anamnesis and queer poe(/li)tics: Dissident sexualities and the erotics of transgression in Cyprus
More LessThis article examines queer Cyprus issues in terms of national and sexual identity politics, queer historiography and a transgressive aesthetic of desire. It relies on the premise that focusing on the personal experience of desire offers a mode of narrative that may mitigate the displacement of queer experience and subvert systemic oppression. At various moments and most prominently in Part D, the writing attempts a discursive performance whose context, tone and character adjust themselves to the article’s engagement with queer politics of Cyprus. As an ultimate goal, this performance seeks to contribute less to the much-rehearsed debates on sexual identities and more to their attendant politics of power and to the poetics of desire. Along with the pursuit of sexual fulfilment, the poetics of desire become fundamental elements in constructing a sense of personal sexual history. As I examine the legacies of colonial orientalism within the context of queer desire, I explore the possibility of spaces where dissenting sexualities may inscribe a trajectory while in the grip of strictures that determine gender, sexual and national performance. By turning attention to personal spaces, this article delineates a subjective consciousness whose personal imaginings expand into queer embodiments that unfold across and beyond.
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Bodies of truth: The terrible beauty of queer performance
More LessThis piece examines five recent performances from Greece in an attempt to map both their interventions and contributions to the development of Greek queer aesthetics. It provides a chart of this relatively unknown performative landscape and explains how the queering process works in constructing queer ‘freaks’, cultural mourning and a new iconography of Greekness.
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