East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies |

“I’d Rather Be Homeful Than Homeless”: Homing Queer Corporeality and Uprooting Exilic Memory in Domnica Rădulescu’s “Exile is My Home”

Andreea Moise

December 2024

Domnica Rădulescu’s play “Exile Is My Home” (2014) engages with the traumatic memory of exilic displacement by casting its two queer female heroines as “intergalactic nomads in search of a place to belong,” whose nostalgic quest frames notions of utopian belonging and radical female experience as political gestures. “Exile Is My Home” articulates an attempt at configuring what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari termed a minor literature whose narrow currency subsists on a deterritorialised vocabulary of the lesbian/bisexual exilic minority. Its fashioning within the play actively questions what Homi Bhabha (1992) deemed the unhomely home projected into the social reality of the world and creates a reterritorialisation of exilic experience that only narrowly includes queer uprootings and alternate queer(ed) homings. Keywords: exilic nomadism, queer phenomenology, nostalgia, exile

Eng

Meeting With Ghosts: Telling a Story That’s Impossible to Tell

Issue Article

Eirini Marina Dafermou

https://doi.org/10.52323/098734

November 2024

Dear Fahima, Farzana, Rabea, I heard about your assassination on October 11, 2018, from the newspapers and TV. Normally, you wouldn't have made it to the mainstream news, maybe only the local media would add your bodies to their (un)documented archive, out of obligation to October's empty front page. Normally, you would have reached the morgue of the coroner in Alexandroupolis, because of drowning, of hypothermia, of hardships, this is how refugees and immigrant women die in Evros, this is their normalized death – how did you find yourself chained and stabbed in the neck? If only you knew the disturbance you have caused to the residents of Evros! They were so afraid, not for the lives of the refugees who are at risk at the border, no, this is a reasonable and normal thing to happen, like the river that floods during the winter or the storks that come in the summer. They feared for their own lives since they were sure and certain that a jihadist killed you. Photos of ISIS fighters filled the newspapers, on every website you could read that the Turks are not guarding the passages, and the Greek army and police are not enough despite their heroic efforts and that 500,000 Afghans are waiting in Eastern Thrace to cross, so they find you everywhere, in the fields, in the villages, in their homes. They lock themselves in the houses and close the shutters “so you won’t bust in.” But the violence they fear is the violence they cause, as Butler reminds us in Precarious Life (2004).

Eng

When Belonging is Not the Answer: An Essay about the Usage of Personal Experience in Daily Life Lesbian* Activism

Feminist Collective

Simona Dumitriu

https://doi.org/10.52323/098718

November 2024

The answer is not within belonging. A short conclusion-like statement to open and close this condensed essay, although an obscure one. The answer to what, you may ask. The question is harder to pinpoint, as it is not one, not always the same, it shifts its shape within a conglomerate: where do I place myself in a community, in a new configuration of borders, can one impose belonging onto others, and does the oppressed want to belong in the oppressor’s world, or is belonging, here, not the appropriate name? Can I still find belonging in the word queer?

Eng

An Analysis on Autonomous Feminist and Queer Safe Spaces: The Case Study of PHYL.IS. A.U.Th.

Issue Article

Angie Pantzartzidi

Gregory Pritsas

https://doi.org/10.52323/098744

November 2024

The greek students’ Union for gender and equality “PHYL.IS.” was created on a whim, during the lockdowns of 2020, as a way for us to express our anger, frustration and resentment of not being heard or seen in spaces we thought we had reclaimed. Our efforts to unite our voices with the voices of people who wish to participate in feminist and queer discourses and fight for equality have led to the construction of a space of sisterhood, solace and support in a time of uncertainty when it was most needed. During its three years of function, despite the difficulties we had and still have to overcome, PHYL.IS. has become a solid entity shaped by its members’ experiences. In turn, the Union is now shaping us, its members. Through all the challenges we faced due to the entrenched inequalities and hostile systemic structures that exist in Greece, through all the mistakes we made, the stories we shared, the assertations we fought for, we found support in places we never knew existed, and we were taught valuable lessons of feminist and queer resistance. This paper is an extended rendition of the roundtable we conducted in May 2023 during the QueerFemSEE International Conference in Athens, incorporating comments and observations. By using the case study of PHYL.IS., we aim to examine the creation and preservation of autonomous feminist and queer safe spaces that survive the adversities of functioning in conservative, heteronormative and patriarchal societies. Keywords: feminist collective, safe space, feminist practices, resistance practices, grassroot spaces

Eng

“The West Is (Not) the Best” – Anti-Gender Narratives and Queer-Feminist Struggles in Greece

Issue Article

Sofia Bempeza

https://doi.org/10.52323/098786

October 2024

The anti-gender narratives and policies that attack women's and LGBTQ+ rights (gender, sexual and reproductive freedoms) come largely from right-wing parties, conservative think tanks, far-right political organizations and alt-right networks, authoritarian governments, and representatives of the Catholic and the Orthodox Church. The paper highlights current anti-gender politics, including reactionary discourses, strategies, and multiple (institutional) actors that seek to undermine societal and legal progress for intersectional feminism and the LGBTQ+ movement. In this vein, it draws attention to the anti-gender arguments and the imports of the white (male) supremacy ideology in the Greek context. More thoroughly, the paper outlines, on the one hand, the anti-gender movement and the ways in which nature, nation, and normality construct its main narrative as it sheds light on the alt-right discourse, ethnopatriarchy, and the heteronormative standards within Greek society. On the other, the paper traces local queer-feminist struggles and activist practices that seek to resist the continuum of gender-based violence, homophobic/transphobic violence, systemic racism, and discrimination. Queer-feminist struggles gained strength and new perspectives in the aftermath of Zak Kostopoulos/Zackie Oh’s murder and the eruption of the #metoo movement, whereas new collective struggles for defending women's and LGBTQ+ rights take place against rising fascisms and the neoliberal control of reproduction. Keywords: anti-gender narratives, gender-based violence, queer-feminist struggles, vulnerability, dissident voices

Ukr

Втікаючи від окупації Маріуполя

Online Article

Юлія Сорока

https://doi.org/10.52323/098763

August 2024

Цю статтю написано на основі щоденника, який вела авторка Юлія Сорока, перебуваючи на початку повномасштабної війни в Маріуполі. Маріуполь – українське місто на березі Азовського моря, засноване у XVIII столітті. До російського вторгнення місто з населенням понад 400 тисяч осіб було портом, промисловим і туристичним центром Донецької області. 24 лютого 2022 року місто стало зоною бойових дій, на початку березня було оточене, а 20 травня окуповане російськими військами.

Eng

Decolonizing Feminism: the NGO-ization Paradigm between the Global Circuits of Neoliberal Power and the Politics of Location. The Case of Romania

Issue Article

Alexandra Ana

https://doi.org/10.52323/794302

June 2023

While the NGO-ization paradigm helped explain the institutionalization, professionalization, and bureaucratization of feminist movements around the world, from the late 80s and early 90s on, by focusing on the most visible actors, it often concealed the multiplicity of feminisms and their internal heterogeneity. By looking at the institutionalization of feminism in Romania through decolonial lenses, this essay aims to understand some of the transnational processes that have been overlooked or curtailed within the NGO-ization literature, the mechanisms through which certain forms of feminist knowledge and practice became hegemonic and institutionalized, and some of their consequences. The essay argues that the travelling and crossings, initiated by those excluded through these processes and who inhabit liminal, in-between spaces, contributed to making visible multiple worlds of sense towards a pluralist feminism, opening the possibility to build deep coalitions by engaging in complex communication.

Eng

A Queer History of Communism: Navigating Sexuality and Gender in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1989

Analytic Review

Alexandria Wilson-McDonald

https://doi.org/10.52323/208952

December 2022

Věra Sokolová's book Queer Encounters with Communist Power: Non-heterosexual Lives and the State in Czechoslovakia, 1948–1989 provides a welcomed and compelling historical contribution through an examination of the experiences of queer and non-heterosexual people's lives under state-socialism in Czechoslovakia. Sokolová explores how queer and non-heterosexual people navigated their identities historically in Czechoslovakia and the role of sexologists in defining concepts of identity and supporting queer and non-heterosexual people under state socialism. This work is crucial today in resisting the claims made by far-right and anti-gender actors that LGBT politics and "gender" is a "Western" import without a local history and struggle.

Eng

A Decade after “Theorizing NGOs”: The Entanglement of State, Feminism, and Neoliberalism

Review

Andreja Mesarič

https://doi.org/10.52323/746592

June 2022

The article reviews an edited volume about the prominence of NGOs in women’s organizing and gender-focused international development and how this has transformed feminist activism since the 1990s. The editors do not frame the book as a history of this “NGOization,” but rather as an open discussion of how feminist activism fares in this transformed environment bringing new opportunities and limitations. The volume also addresses how the global North-South divide structures unequal access to power and resources for NGOs and feminist activists. It includes several chapters discussing NGOs and feminist activism in Eastern Europe but, as argued by the reviewer, struggles somewhat to situate the region within the global North-South paradigm.

Eng

Borderlands in European Gender Studies: Feminisms of Postsocialist Europe

Review

Jelena Košinaga

https://doi.org/10.52323/209382

May 2022

“Borderlands in European Gender Studies: Beyond the East-West Frontier,” edited by Teresa Kulawik and Zhanna Kravchenko, is a book that arose from a 2011 conference entitled “Why Is There No Happiness in the East? The Making of European Gender Studies,” at the University of Södertörn in Stockholm. The discussions at the conference mainly tackled the duality between Eastern and Western feminisms within the larger scope of gender studies. Aside from the introduction and epilogue, the book is organized into three parts, comprising ten chapters altogether.

UkrMUL

Своїм і чужим голосом

Review

Маріам Агамян

Дмітрій Єрмоловіч-Дащінскій

https://doi.org/10.52323/620901

February 2022

Ідея дослідження народилась у горах Киргизстану на семінарі журналістської і правозахисної мережі «Unit». Діалог про сучасні квір-театр і квір-драматургію виявився захопливим і складним: настільки багатогранні ці теми у Східній Європі. Вони, безперечно, не мають точного тлумачення, що відкриває двері для творчого пошуку й інтерпретації.

Другу частину рецензії читайте російською.

MUL