Precarious Intensities: Gendered Bodies in the Streets and Squares of Greece

Ideology as blocked mourning: Greek national identity in times of economic crisis and austerity

“…As he said, 'the infection passes from the undocumented migrant women to the Greek male customer, into the Greek family'. 60 The pro-austerity camp can thus be understood as attempting to deflect indignation away from the austerity agenda, redirecting the affects of loss onto others. A characteristic example of such redirection of anger through scapegoating is Minister of Finance Evangelos Venizelos's response to the accusations of delaying the investigation of a list of Greeks suspected of smuggling large amounts of untaxed money to banks outside Greece.…”

“This Marble Head in My Hands”: Green Greeks and the Question of the Parthenon

“…32 The pluralities of protest that Athanasiou outlines are crucial to understanding the connection among austerity measures, a Western gaze on an exoticized Greece, and twinned movements of environmental depletion and pollution. Global media has conflated a wide range of protests (against, for example, fascism, austerity measures, racism, immigration laws, gendered violence) into "antiausterity protests, " but it has failed to recognize that Western economic discourse has absorbed the multiplicity of unrest into the Police bus parked in Parliament Square housing both mat and regular officers.…”

Staging Equality in Greek Squares: Hybrid Spaces of Political Subjectification

“…Protesters in the squares, who came to call themselves the Indignants ( Αγανακτισμένοι ), were a socio‐economically and ideologically heterogeneous multitude (Sotirakopoulos and Sotiropoulos, ; Kioupkiolis, ; Kaika and Karaliotas, ). Although most were variously affected by the imposed austerity measures, they differed in ‘their social situations, coping strategies, and narratives of blame, thus creating a plural embodied space of discontent' (Athanasiou, : 3). This was a—collectively produced—political space in which the protesters enacted direct democratic practices and performatively traced new ways of being, saying and acting in common.…”

“…Indeed, in coming together in the squares, the protesters were moving beyond their established identities ‘predicated on a transsubjective , broadly shared but differently situated sense of vulnerability to the injuries of injustice' (Athanasiou, : 3, emphasis added). Yet the squares movement constituted a break with previous subject positions that cannot be adequately captured through an emphasis on identity formation or the coming together of diverse (urban) social movements.…”

“…Yet the squares movement constituted a break with previous subject positions that cannot be adequately captured through an emphasis on identity formation or the coming together of diverse (urban) social movements. Rather, it kindled an incipient process of becoming a collective political subject (Stavrides, ; Douzinas, ; Prentoulis and Thomassen, ; Athanasiou, ). Hence, notwithstanding the importance of the insights the literatures on (urban) social movements and contentious politics have contributed, this article seeks to move a step further to account for this spatialized process of political subjectification.…”