No abstract

This article explores the ways through which feminist and women's agency is articulated in the Cypriot context through the paradigms of nationalism, peace and conflict. It does so to broaden our understanding of gendered and peace agency in troubled and divided societies, where complex and conflicting discourses meet. Analyzing data from interviews with feminist and women's groups' representatives, it examines how nationalism and women's approaches to gender, politics, peace and conflict enable or restrict feminist and women's agency. It finds that a strategic essentialism approach has initiated a reconfiguration of gender(ed) power relations, women's agency and peacebuilding processes. It argues that when this approach is combined with feminist theory and praxis and the employment of transnational peace paradigms, the possibilities of feminist and women's agency increase, as long as feminist scholarship and grassroots activism inform each other through dialogue. Therefore, it highlights the nuanced and complex dialectic between essentialist and anti-essentialist feminist gender discourses.

In the context of Europeanization, transnational LGBTI rights and politics discourses and paradigms interact with local ones. However, the effects of this interaction on trans* people in the margins of ‘Europe’ have received little attention. Drawing from participant observation and interviews with trans* respondents, I examine how trans* subjectivities and politics in Cyprus are shaped amidst this process. I show that institutional responses to trans* claims reinforce trans* marginalization. I find that trans* people are marginalized in, and disappointed by the normalization of, the (trans)national LGBTI movement. I argue that these factors induce alternative modes of everyday trans* politics and community organizing outside NGO structures. Therefore, this article helps decentre trans* studies’ typical focus on Western Europe, North America and Australasia, while offering an analysis of the role of Europeanization in Cypriot LGBTI politics.

No abstract

No abstract