Texts

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

Angie Pantzartzidi

Gregory Pritsas

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

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

Sofia Bempeza

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

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

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.

"We cannot be included on your terms": a queer critic of the imperialist view in "Gaycation: Ukraine"

nadiya chushak

Yulia Serdyukova

Iryna Tantsiura

November 2021

In March 2016, a camera crew from the television show “Gaycation” visited Ukraine as a part of their mission to “explore LGBTQ cultures around the world”. This article critically questions the show's solidarity with Ukrainian LGBT+ and analyzes it as a manifestation of the neoliberal imperial “queer” view. We demonstrate how “Gaycation Ukraine” under the guise of global queer solidarity reproduces practices that reinforce inequality and asymmetrical power relations between the West and the rest, as well as within Ukrainian society. The article exposes the show’s reliance on the tropes of homonormativity and homonationalism and analyzes characteristics of mainstream Ukrainian LGBT+ activism. The text is available in Ukrainian.

Introduction to Fucking Solidarity: Queering Concepts on/from a Post-Soviet Perspective

Katharina Wiedlack

Olenka Dmytryk

Syaivo

https://doi.org/10.52323/567892

October 2021

This article introduces some of the questions, activist and theoretical concepts featured in the special issue “Fucking solidarity: Queering Concepts on/from a post-Soviet Perspective”. It reflects on the usage and applicability of the term queer and queer concepts within post-Soviet and postsocialist spaces, by playfully using the “fucking” as critical term, to emphasize queer’s original potential to offend and disrupt within English language. It reflects on the possibilities of queer and feminist solidarities across the East/West divide that do not fall into the trap of (Western) hegemony or anti-Western sentiments. Framing queer solidarity as “working together,” it looks for the possibilities of egalitarian mutual support across national and cultural borders. Finally, it gives an overview of the texts collected in the special issue. The text is also available in Ukrainian and Russian

Same-sex Parenting Practices in Hungary as an Assertion of Intimate Citizenship

Rita Béres-Deák

https://doi.org/10.52323/429832

January 2021

My paper examines the practices of Hungarian same-sex parents through which they claim inclusion in a society whose laws and public discourses define the concept of family in a heteronormative way, and where legal and practical constraints make it difficult for same-sex couples to become parents. I suggest that LGBTQ people and communities exhibit considerable agency in breaking through the barriers to their plans and acceptance. This agency does not only manifest itself in political activism (including its personalized versions, such as coming out), but also in private, sometimes even illegal and semi-legal practices like language use, finding loopholes in the system, promoting alternative values or leaving the country. The examination of these practices from an intimate citizenship perspective may broaden the concept itself and helps examine and acknowledge the power of individuals to fight against heteronormative views of family and relationships.

Queering Bratislava: On Borders, Otherness and Public Space

Myrto Tsilimpounidi

https://doi.org/10.52323/4187322

July 2020

This paper follows the multiple layers of an urban fabric that is stereotypically characterised as ‘post-socialist’, yet in essence it is subject to ongoing transitions – much like the notion of being queer. What can we learn from queer theory in relation to post-socialist urban theory? What are the methodological advancements that derive from a queer approach on research? In this light the presentation breaks the usually logocentric academic discourse as it engages with the premises of visual sociology. Using visual material from Bratislava focusing on urban inscriptions (street art, urban interventions) it opens up a discussion about the changes in the city and the struggles of different groups.

Stigmatization of the Analytical Concept of Gender as Ideology

Erzsébet Barát

https://doi.org/10.52323/365072

February 2020

I identify three junctures … since the system change in 1989, which have emerged and crystalized into the discourses of ‘gender ideology’ and ‘gender-craze’. This appropriation of ’gender’, the key category in feminist analysis is a serious attack to stigmatize and ostracize its critical potential and existence. I shall reflect on the specificities of these changes and argue for a model of meaning in terms of polyvocality that is always already open to critique. We need such a socially situated model to reclaim gender as the critical category of analysis that has been developed to expose the very ideological interest of patriarchal institutions to re/produce unequal relations of power as given. (This is original text in English; the translation is available in Ukrainian).

The Wretched on the Walls: A Fanonian Reading of a Revolutionary Albanian Orphanage

Genta Nishku

https://doi.org/10.52323/309702

February 2020

Abstract

Using Franz Fanon’s “On Violence,” this paper analyzes dynamics of power and violence in Lulëkuqet mbi Mure / Red Poppies on Walls, a 1976 Albanian film about WWII anti-fascist resistance, told through the story of a group of orphans in Italian-occupied Albania. Fanon’s explication that the colonizer’s power is founded on force and maintained through violence, capitalist exploitation, dehumanization and compartmentalization, elucidates the film. His argument that decolonization is possible only through greater counter-violence is critical in understanding why the orphans use violent means to liberate themselves. The children’s struggle against the fascist orphanage directors is noticed and harnessed Communist Party members. I argue that though the Party’s guidance helps the children fight their subjugation, it also curbs their revolutionary potential. Thus, the didactic and propagandistic goals of Lulëkuqet mbi Mure allow only for a strict cold war dichotomy: one is either a fascist, capitalist and colonizer, or a communist, revolted colonized subject ready to take up arms. My engagement with the film, however, demonstrates that the children’s solidarity with one another and their subtle resistance prior to the communists’ intervention, gestured toward an alternative way of building community – one closer to Fanon’s ideas of a new humanism, even if it ultimately remains unrealized in the film.

A Heavy Word: Discourses on Albanian Sworn Virgins

Jeta (Jetim) Luboteni

https://doi.org/10.52323/329802

November 2019

Abstract

This paper takes up the portrayal of burrnesha in media, where they are usually referred to as sworn virgins. Specifically, this paper utilizes news clips and informational videos accessible on YouTube in order to better understand the interplay of power dynamics between the West and Albania. The majority of these videos constitute a dominant discourse, aligned with most of the literature, that presents the custom of burrnesha as curious and anachronistic. This paper divides the pattern of Western engagement into four sub-themes: knowing, judging, finding, and dying. These themes are evident in the unequal power relations that allow the Western journalists to discover burrnesha, define them, and critique not only them, but Albanians and the Balkans more broadly. Indeed, the videos suggest that this practice is dying out on its own as the Balkans attempt to join modernity. The burrnesha themselves are understood as forced into a male role that punishes the breaking of the oath of celibacy by death. However, the burrnesha, when interviewed, form a counter-narrative by complicating the rigid picture put forth in the literature and media. While they show nuance in their respective motivations, all show satisfaction with their lives. Finally, this paper reflects upon the interplay of the Western gaze, and the ways in which Albanian media interacts with its own people. I argue that most Albanian media distances itself from the burrnesha in order to make claims of being civilized vis-à-vis the straggling burrnesha who remain an anomaly to progress.

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