Anna Carastathis
Anna Carastathis (b.1981) is a political philosopher and co-director of the Feminist Autonomous Centre for research (feministresearch.org).
Anna is currently a primary co-investigator on RESIST: "Fostering Queer Feminist Intersectional Resistances against Transnational Anti-Gender Politics" (theresistproject.eu).
Anna wrote "Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons" (published by the University of Nebraska Press, 2016, in its Expanding Frontiers Series), which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association.
Her second monograph is entitled "Reproducing Refugees: Photographìa of a Crisis," (co-authored with Myrto Tsilimpounidi, published by Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020, in its Challenging Migration Studies series).
She has co-edited collections and special journal issues in trans studies ("Transfeminist International!" FAC press, 2023), critical migration studies ("Intersectional Feminist Interventions in the 'Refugee Crisis,'" Refuge, 2018), and visual studies ("Inscriptions of Crisis," CITY, 2021).
Anna received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from McGill University (2009). She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre de recherche en éthique de l’ Université de Montréal (2008-2009) at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia (2011-2012), and at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (2021-2023), as well as Assistant Professor of Feminist Philosophy in the department of Philosophy at California State University Los Angeles (2009-2015).
Anna lives in Athens.
Anna is currently a primary co-investigator on RESIST: "Fostering Queer Feminist Intersectional Resistances against Transnational Anti-Gender Politics" (theresistproject.eu).
Anna wrote "Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons" (published by the University of Nebraska Press, 2016, in its Expanding Frontiers Series), which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association.
Her second monograph is entitled "Reproducing Refugees: Photographìa of a Crisis," (co-authored with Myrto Tsilimpounidi, published by Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020, in its Challenging Migration Studies series).
She has co-edited collections and special journal issues in trans studies ("Transfeminist International!" FAC press, 2023), critical migration studies ("Intersectional Feminist Interventions in the 'Refugee Crisis,'" Refuge, 2018), and visual studies ("Inscriptions of Crisis," CITY, 2021).
Anna received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from McGill University (2009). She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre de recherche en éthique de l’ Université de Montréal (2008-2009) at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia (2011-2012), and at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (2021-2023), as well as Assistant Professor of Feminist Philosophy in the department of Philosophy at California State University Los Angeles (2009-2015).
Anna lives in Athens.
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Books by Anna Carastathis
Transfeminist International! is a call for an insurgent, intersectional, abolitionist transfeminism.
///
To βιβλίο Τρανσφεμινιστική Διεθνής! εξετάζει τις σχέσεις μεταξύ των πολλαπλών, διασταυρούμενων κρίσεων του νεοφιλελεύθερου καπιταλισμού· της παγκόσμιας άνοδου του φασισμού και της λευκή υπεροχής· και των κινητοποιήσεων «έναντια του φύλου», συμπεριλαμβανόμενων και των αυτοαποκαλούμενων «φεμινιστικών» πολιτικών οι οποίες αντιτίθενται στην τρανς ύπαρξη. Πέντε λαμπροί θεωρητικοί της τρανς θεωρίας —το Marquis Bey, η Jules Joanne Gleeson, η Elle O’Rourke, η Trish Salah και η McKenzie Wark— συζητούν πως αντιστεκόμαστε ενάντια στην οργανωμένη τρανσφοβία, τη θεσμοθέτησή της, την κανονικοποίηση και τη βίαιη έκφρασή της σε όλο το πολιτικό φάσμα, σε διάφορες γεωγραφίες και κοινωνικοπολιτισμικά πλαίσια.
Η Τρανσφεμινιστική Διεθνής! μάς καλεί σε έναν εξεγερτικό, διαθεματικό, καταργητικό τρανσφεμινισμό.
**Reviews**
"This timely book offers a vivid critical account of the ethics and politics underpinning the visual economy of what has been notoriously called “Europe’s refugee crisis”. From the standpoint of the borders of postcolonial Mediterranean, it opens compelling terrains of critical engagement with epistemologies and lived experiences of “crisis”, tracing how the photographic can become an apparatus of biopoliticized reproduction, visual objectification and epistemic violence, but also, occasionally, comes to articulate transformative solidarity and utopian imaginaries. Reproducing Refugees: Photographìa of a Crisis provides an engaging meditation on how fraught registers of precarity, displacement, belonging, and national citizenship are embedded in racialized, gendered, and sexualized fields of vision and knowledge production. In thinking of “crisis” as a frame through which subjects and the political are (re)produced and made (in)visible, the book mobilizes queer feminist, antiracist, and decolonial perspectives to test the limits of bringing crisis and reproduction together. In so doing, it offers a valuable lens through which to imagine the possibility of change, whereby photographìa might be repurposed to unsettle normative figurations of the present."
— Athena Athanasiou, Professor of Social Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences
"In Reproducing Refugees, Anna Carastathis and Myrto Tsilimpounidi make a compelling case for the central and indispensable role of photography in mediating the spectacle of Europe’s “refugee crisis.” This book offers a vital critique of the visual economy of objectification by which human subjects crossing state borders are turned into the racialized and gendered objects of other people’s pity or protection, or alternately, of their fear and loathing. Meanwhile, the visual discourse of photography propagates an illusion of transparency even as it remains both equivocal and incomplete – lending its imagery to diametrically opposed interpretations, while also framing events and predicaments in ways that conceal far more than they reveal. And by framing “crisis,” the authors show that photography’s visual economy is indeed an economy of power that inculcates ignorance and cultivates consent and complicity with the border regime’s violence."
— Nicholas de Genova, Professor and Chair of Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Houston
"A significant intervention into the politics of ‘crisis’ and mobilities, this exciting book foregrounds reproduction, temporalities and the visual. It demonstrates the intensively productive nature of a metaphorical and literal queer lens on human movement. Challenging containment in nations and families in favour of making new connections it offers a guide to thought and action. Read it!"
— Bridget Anderson, Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship, University of Bristol
"Engaging with the photographic representation of the summer of migration of 2015 through the angle of social reproduction theory, Anna Carastathis and Myrto Tsilimpounidi's book offers an excellent decolonial queer-feminist analysis of the contemporary conjuncture of crisis in the modern-colonial world system."
— Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Professor of Sociology, University of Giessen
"Reproducing Refugees" published in the Challenging Migration Studies series, edited by Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley.
Through a close reading of critical race theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s germinal texts, published more than twenty-five years ago, I urge analytic clarity, contextual rigor, and a politicized, historicized understanding of this widely traveling concept. Intersectionality’s roots in social justice movements and critical intellectual projects—specifically Black feminism—must be retraced and synthesized with a decolonial analysis so its radical potential to actualize coalitions can be enacted.
The book was published in November 2016 as part of the new UNP series "Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality" edited by Karen Leong and Andrea Smith.
Papers by Anna Carastathis
Abstract in English: The systematic obfuscation and silencing of gendered violence in heteropatriarchal societies is not only a key obstacle to the reporting of specific incidents, but also a mechanism for the reproduction of violence. Paradoxically, however, the imperative to "break the silence" addressed to people who have been subjected to violence may reproduce precisely the silencing of the very phenomenon that it is supposed to highlight.
[Abstract in English follows]
Το παρόν άρθρο πραγματεύεται την ατμοσφαιρική εννοιολόγηση της έμφυλης-φυλετικοποιημένης βίας, η οποία συνδέεται με τη μαύρη φεμινιστική σκέψη με την ύπαρξη και λειτουργία πολλαπλών, συνυφασμένων συστημάτων καταπίεσης. Παρουσιάζει μια διαθεματική προσέγγιση η οποία αποφεύγει την απομόνωση περιστατικών βίας από τις δομές, τους θεσμούς, τις υλικές, συναισθηματικές και αναπαραστατικές οικονομίες στο εσωτερικό των οποίων λαμβάνει χώρα η διαπροσωπική βία. Έπειτα, το άρθρο συνδέει την ατμοσφαιρικότητα της βίας με την ηγεμονία του φύλου, το οποίο υπό μια τρανσφεμινιστική οπτική αποφαίνεται να αποτελεί όχι μόνο τη βάση ή την αφορμή βίαιων πράξεων, αλλά να αποτελεί βία. Τελικά, το άρθρο προτείνει ότι μια διαθεματική προσέγγιση καθιστά δυνατή την κριτική αντίληψη των λογοθετικών διάκενων μεταξύ των διαφόρων δηλωμένων και αδήλωτων κρίσεων και την αποπνικτική και αιφνιδιαστική βία που τις διαρθρώνει.
[Abstract]
In this paper, I discuss the atmospheric conception of gendered-racialised violence, which in black feminist thought is connected to the existence and functioning of multiple, intermeshed systems of oppression. I present an intersectional approach, which avoids isolating or abstracting incidents of violence from the structures, institutions, material, affective, and representational economies in and through which interpersonal violence occurs. I connect the atmosphericity of violence to the hegemony of gender, which from a transfeminist perspective is revealed to constitute not only the basis or the pretext of violent acts, but to constitute violence. Finally, I suggest that an intersectional approach renders possible the critical perception of the discursive interstices between various declared and undeclared crises and the suffocating and sudden violence that articulates them.
Transfeminist International! is a call for an insurgent, intersectional, abolitionist transfeminism.
///
To βιβλίο Τρανσφεμινιστική Διεθνής! εξετάζει τις σχέσεις μεταξύ των πολλαπλών, διασταυρούμενων κρίσεων του νεοφιλελεύθερου καπιταλισμού· της παγκόσμιας άνοδου του φασισμού και της λευκή υπεροχής· και των κινητοποιήσεων «έναντια του φύλου», συμπεριλαμβανόμενων και των αυτοαποκαλούμενων «φεμινιστικών» πολιτικών οι οποίες αντιτίθενται στην τρανς ύπαρξη. Πέντε λαμπροί θεωρητικοί της τρανς θεωρίας —το Marquis Bey, η Jules Joanne Gleeson, η Elle O’Rourke, η Trish Salah και η McKenzie Wark— συζητούν πως αντιστεκόμαστε ενάντια στην οργανωμένη τρανσφοβία, τη θεσμοθέτησή της, την κανονικοποίηση και τη βίαιη έκφρασή της σε όλο το πολιτικό φάσμα, σε διάφορες γεωγραφίες και κοινωνικοπολιτισμικά πλαίσια.
Η Τρανσφεμινιστική Διεθνής! μάς καλεί σε έναν εξεγερτικό, διαθεματικό, καταργητικό τρανσφεμινισμό.
**Reviews**
"This timely book offers a vivid critical account of the ethics and politics underpinning the visual economy of what has been notoriously called “Europe’s refugee crisis”. From the standpoint of the borders of postcolonial Mediterranean, it opens compelling terrains of critical engagement with epistemologies and lived experiences of “crisis”, tracing how the photographic can become an apparatus of biopoliticized reproduction, visual objectification and epistemic violence, but also, occasionally, comes to articulate transformative solidarity and utopian imaginaries. Reproducing Refugees: Photographìa of a Crisis provides an engaging meditation on how fraught registers of precarity, displacement, belonging, and national citizenship are embedded in racialized, gendered, and sexualized fields of vision and knowledge production. In thinking of “crisis” as a frame through which subjects and the political are (re)produced and made (in)visible, the book mobilizes queer feminist, antiracist, and decolonial perspectives to test the limits of bringing crisis and reproduction together. In so doing, it offers a valuable lens through which to imagine the possibility of change, whereby photographìa might be repurposed to unsettle normative figurations of the present."
— Athena Athanasiou, Professor of Social Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences
"In Reproducing Refugees, Anna Carastathis and Myrto Tsilimpounidi make a compelling case for the central and indispensable role of photography in mediating the spectacle of Europe’s “refugee crisis.” This book offers a vital critique of the visual economy of objectification by which human subjects crossing state borders are turned into the racialized and gendered objects of other people’s pity or protection, or alternately, of their fear and loathing. Meanwhile, the visual discourse of photography propagates an illusion of transparency even as it remains both equivocal and incomplete – lending its imagery to diametrically opposed interpretations, while also framing events and predicaments in ways that conceal far more than they reveal. And by framing “crisis,” the authors show that photography’s visual economy is indeed an economy of power that inculcates ignorance and cultivates consent and complicity with the border regime’s violence."
— Nicholas de Genova, Professor and Chair of Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Houston
"A significant intervention into the politics of ‘crisis’ and mobilities, this exciting book foregrounds reproduction, temporalities and the visual. It demonstrates the intensively productive nature of a metaphorical and literal queer lens on human movement. Challenging containment in nations and families in favour of making new connections it offers a guide to thought and action. Read it!"
— Bridget Anderson, Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship, University of Bristol
"Engaging with the photographic representation of the summer of migration of 2015 through the angle of social reproduction theory, Anna Carastathis and Myrto Tsilimpounidi's book offers an excellent decolonial queer-feminist analysis of the contemporary conjuncture of crisis in the modern-colonial world system."
— Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Professor of Sociology, University of Giessen
"Reproducing Refugees" published in the Challenging Migration Studies series, edited by Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley.
Through a close reading of critical race theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s germinal texts, published more than twenty-five years ago, I urge analytic clarity, contextual rigor, and a politicized, historicized understanding of this widely traveling concept. Intersectionality’s roots in social justice movements and critical intellectual projects—specifically Black feminism—must be retraced and synthesized with a decolonial analysis so its radical potential to actualize coalitions can be enacted.
The book was published in November 2016 as part of the new UNP series "Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality" edited by Karen Leong and Andrea Smith.
Abstract in English: The systematic obfuscation and silencing of gendered violence in heteropatriarchal societies is not only a key obstacle to the reporting of specific incidents, but also a mechanism for the reproduction of violence. Paradoxically, however, the imperative to "break the silence" addressed to people who have been subjected to violence may reproduce precisely the silencing of the very phenomenon that it is supposed to highlight.
[Abstract in English follows]
Το παρόν άρθρο πραγματεύεται την ατμοσφαιρική εννοιολόγηση της έμφυλης-φυλετικοποιημένης βίας, η οποία συνδέεται με τη μαύρη φεμινιστική σκέψη με την ύπαρξη και λειτουργία πολλαπλών, συνυφασμένων συστημάτων καταπίεσης. Παρουσιάζει μια διαθεματική προσέγγιση η οποία αποφεύγει την απομόνωση περιστατικών βίας από τις δομές, τους θεσμούς, τις υλικές, συναισθηματικές και αναπαραστατικές οικονομίες στο εσωτερικό των οποίων λαμβάνει χώρα η διαπροσωπική βία. Έπειτα, το άρθρο συνδέει την ατμοσφαιρικότητα της βίας με την ηγεμονία του φύλου, το οποίο υπό μια τρανσφεμινιστική οπτική αποφαίνεται να αποτελεί όχι μόνο τη βάση ή την αφορμή βίαιων πράξεων, αλλά να αποτελεί βία. Τελικά, το άρθρο προτείνει ότι μια διαθεματική προσέγγιση καθιστά δυνατή την κριτική αντίληψη των λογοθετικών διάκενων μεταξύ των διαφόρων δηλωμένων και αδήλωτων κρίσεων και την αποπνικτική και αιφνιδιαστική βία που τις διαρθρώνει.
[Abstract]
In this paper, I discuss the atmospheric conception of gendered-racialised violence, which in black feminist thought is connected to the existence and functioning of multiple, intermeshed systems of oppression. I present an intersectional approach, which avoids isolating or abstracting incidents of violence from the structures, institutions, material, affective, and representational economies in and through which interpersonal violence occurs. I connect the atmosphericity of violence to the hegemony of gender, which from a transfeminist perspective is revealed to constitute not only the basis or the pretext of violent acts, but to constitute violence. Finally, I suggest that an intersectional approach renders possible the critical perception of the discursive interstices between various declared and undeclared crises and the suffocating and sudden violence that articulates them.
Διαβάζοντας τα αποσπάσματα των οκτώ προφορικών ιστοριών που αφηγήθηκαν φεμινίστριες, λεσβίες, κουήρ άτομα, αμφιφυλόφιλες και ετεροφυλόφιλες γυναίκες, μαθαίνουμε πώς βίωσαν τη μεταπολιτευτική περίοδο μέσω της εμπλοκής τους σε φεμινιστικά, εργατικά, ή και αντιεξουσιαστικά κινήματα. Ενώ οι κοινωνικές συνέπειες της μεταπολίτευσης υπήρξαν σημαντικές, τα όρια (ή σύνορα) της δημοκρατίας, η συμπεριληπτικότητά της και η συναινετική, αντιπροσωπευτική νομιμότητά της αποτελεί συνεχές διακύβευμα μέχρι και σήμερα (ή, ίσως, ειδικά σήμερα).
Το «Έλα να σου πω» συμβάλλει στο να ακουστεί μια εναλλακτική ιστορία μέσω φωνών και βιωμάτων που οι κυρίαρχες ιστορίες της μεταπολίτευσης αρνούνται ή αδυνατούν να ακούσουν και να καταστήσουν ακουστές. Στο σύνολό τους, οι οκτώ αφηγήσεις προτείνουν την ανάγκη και την επιθυμία για μια ιστορία που μας χωράει όλα. Προτείνουν την πολλαπλότητα, συνθετότητα και αντιφατικότητα του βιώματος, ακόμα και στο πλαίσιο μιας μοναδικής ζωής, στο χώρο-χρόνο ενός μοναδικού σώματος.
Αφηγήτριες: Α., Αντουανέττα Αγγελίδη, Angelique Kourounis, Λίτσα, Μ., Άννα Μιχοπούλου, Σ., Φ.
Συμβάλλουν οι: Εβίνα Αλατά, Φαίδρα Βόκαλη, Άννα Καραστάθη, Στέλλα Ανδράδα Κασδοβασίλη, Μαίρη Λογοθέτη, Μαίρη Μιχαηλίδου, Μπέσυ Πολυκάρπου, Κατερίνα Σταυρίδη, Μυρτώ Τσιλιμπουνίδη, Ευαγγελία Χορδάκη
First, I situate Lugones with respect to the current conjuncture in intersectionality studies, in which some scholars are calling for a post-intersectional turn. Then, I reconstruct Lugones’s complex account of intermeshed oppressions, interlocking oppressions, and intersectionality. Finally, I discuss the status of intersectionality in the shift in Lugones’s work from “women of color feminisms” to “decolonial feminism.” Intersectionality is now routinely invoked as a representational theory of multiple identities, but Lugones’s heterodox interpretation helps us to see that it is best understood as a critique of representations based on the logic of purity: specifically, of how categorial axes of oppression (mis)represent intermeshed oppressions. Lugones’s triadic distinction (intersecting/interlocking/intermeshed) points toward a provisional usage of intersectionality, namely, to diagnose the fragmentation of social experiences of multiplicity (which, I would argue, is more consistent with the concept’s original aims). In her visionary philosophy, which attempts to theorize resistance against the grain of fragmentation from a conceptual space outside of the “logic of purity,” we find “glimpses” of a non-fragmented account of oppression, and praxical possibilities for liberatory, decolonial feminist coalitions.
Presentation of my research project "Intersectionality and Racism: Discourses of Resistance in Greece in Times of Intersecting Crises" to the seminar of the Department of Social Anthropology (convenors Eleana Yalouri and Katerina Melissinou), Panteion University, 24 October 2018.
- Ποιά είναι η σχέση μεταξύ διεθνικών εννοιών όπως η διαθεματικότητα και «τοπικών» τρόπων κατανόησης και κινητοποίησης ενάντια στις διακρίσεις, την καταπίεση και τη βία;
- Η χρήση αυτών των εννοιών επιτρέπει το σχηματισμό στρατηγικών συμμαχιών ενάντια στις εκδηλώσεις της θεσμοθετημένης, κοινωνικής και διαπροσωπικής βίας που στοχεύει τις διάφορες κοινωνικές ομάδες;
- Πώς οι ακτιβιστρίες/ές σε διάφορα κοινωνικά κινήματα ορίζουν την αναφορική έκταση και τα σημασιολογικά περιεχόμενα του «ρατσισμού» και της «διαθεματικότητας» και βάσει ποιών βιωματικών γνώσεων και κινηματικών στρατηγικών;
- Πώς αυτές οι έννοιες και τα θεωρητικά υπόβαθρά τους αντανακλούν ή υποκινούν την πολιτική αντίσταση ενάντια στην εκτεταμένη βία εντός και στα σύνορα της ελληνικής κοινωνίας;

Στην επιδίωξη των παραπάνω ερευνητικών ερωτημάτων, το σεμινάριο στοχεύει να χαρτογραφήσει τις «συντακτικές της εξουσίας» στους φεμινιστικούς, ΛΟΑΤΚΙ+, και αντιρατσιστικούς κινηματικούς λόγους.
Θεσμικές, εκπαιδευτικές και πολιτικές προκλήσεις», Πάντειο Πανεπιστήμιο Κοινωνικών και Πολιτικών Επιστημών. Διοργανώτριες: Αθηνά Αθανασίου, Αλεξάνδρα Ζαββού, Βούλα Τουρή, USVSV - Universities Supporting Victims of Sexual Violence: Training for Sustainable Services.
Talk given at the Roundtable "Intersectionality of Sexual and Gendered Violence: Definitions, Research Approaches, and Political Interventions," which took place at the Conference "Addressing Sexual Violence at the University: Institutional, Educational and Political Challenges," Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. Organisers: Athena Athanasiou, Alexandra Zavos, Voula Touri, USVSV - Universities Supporting Victims of Sexual Violence: Training for Sustainable Services.
Friday, November 11, 2016
LISTEN: https://soundcloud.com/nwsa-1/2016-presidential-session-decoloniality-intersectionality-and-critical-resistance#t=0:03?
This session focused on three new books about intersectionality that highlight its activist roots, complex history, and radical possibilities: "Intersectionality," by Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge (Polity Press, 2016); "Intersectionality: An Intellectual History," by Ange-Marie Hancock (Oxford, 2016); and "Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons," by Anna Carastathis (Nebraska, 2016). Drawing on their work across borders and disciplines, the authors discussed:
• How to disrupt U.S.-centric, ahistorical, and/or depoliticized approaches to intersectionality;
• How intersectionality “travels” and is applied (or misapplied) as a critical tool, political lens, and school of thought;
• How intersectionality remains relevant for social justice work and radical politics;
• The need to take up decolonial and intersectional feminist projects together—to delegitimize settler logics, challenge state power, generate effective coalitions, contest endemic violence, or focus on sovereignty politics in new ways, for example.
The session was convened and moderated by Vivian M. May, NWSA President, author of "Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries" (Routledge, 2015).
Μέσω συνομιλιών με ακτιβίστριες/ακτιβιστές ανιχνεύω εννοιολογήσεις συνυφασμένων καταπιέσεων και αντιστάσεων στο λεσβιακό, ομοφυλόφιλο/γκέι, αμφισεξουαλικό, τρανς και κουίρ (ΛΟΑΤΚ) πολιτικό χώρο στην Αθήνα και τη Θεσσαλονίκη. Σημείο αφετηρίας είναι η χρήση και η σημασιοδότηση στους ΛΟΑΤΚ λόγους του όρου «ρατσισμός» ως υπερτασσόμενη έννοια και τις επιμέρους κατηγοριοποιήσεις του, ιδιαίτερα την «ομοφοβία» και την «τρανσφοβία». Πως σχετίζεται ο «ρατσισμός» με την αναδυόμενη στα ελλαδικά συμφραζόμενα έννοια της «διαθεματικότητας» [intersectionality]; Πως ορίζουν την αναφορική έκταση και τα σημασιολογικά περιεχόμενα των εν προκειμένω όρων οι ακτιβίστριες/ακτιβιστές και βάσει ποιων βιωματικών γνώσεων και κινηματικών στρατιγηκών; Πως αυτές οι έννοιες και τα θεωρητικά τους υπόβαθρα αντικατοπτρίζουν ή και καθοδηγούν την πολιτική τους αντίσταση στη διάχυτη βία που εντοπίζουν στο εσωτερικό και στα σύνορα της ελληνικής κοινωνίας; Ποια είδη εν δυνάμει συμμαχιών επιτρέπουν ή προλαμβάνουν οι διαφορικές συνειδητοποιήσεις, εννοιολογήσεις και περιγραφές των πολλαπλών, ταυτόχρονων και συνυφασμένων καταπιέσεων; Προσεγγίζοντας αυτά τα ερωτήματα, ιχνηλατώ τους τρόπους με τους οποίους οι συνομιλήτριες/συνομιλητές μου παράγουν θεωρίες μέσω των οποίων διαφαίνονται, εξηγούνται και αμφισβητούνται οι κοινωνικές συνθήκες ρατσιστικής, ετεροκανονικής και έμφυλης βίας που οι ίδιες/ίδιοι συνταυτίζουν με τους θεσμούς —«πατρίς, θρησκεία, οικογένεια»— που απαρτίζουν το «τρίπτυχο» ή τη «συντακτική της εξουσίας».
// Abstract:
Through conversations with activists, Ι explore conceptualisations of interwoven oppressions and resistances in lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) political spaces in Athens and Thessaloniki. My point of departure is the use and signification of “racism” in LGBTQ discourses as a superordinate concept, as well as that of its subcategories, specifically “homophobia” and “transphobia.” Ηow is this use of “racism” related to the concept of “intersectionality,” now emergent in the Greek context? How do activists define the referential scope and semantic contents of these concepts, based on what knowledges grounded in lived experiences, and on what kinds of social movement strategies? How do these concepts and their theoretical underpinnings reflect or direct activists’ political resistance to the widespread violence that they identify within and on the borders of Greek society? What potential alliances are enabled or prevented by differential consciousnesses, conceptualisations and descriptions of multiple, simultaneous and interwoven oppressions? In approaching these questions, I trace the ways in which my interlocutors produce theories, through which social conditions of racist, heteronormative, and gendered power are made visible, are explained and are contested—conditions that they identify with the institutions —“nation, religion, and family”— that make up the “triptych” or the “syntax of power.”
The workshop on Trans Theories, Trans Poetics, Trans Struggles emerges from the TransCity project (2021-2023), which studied crises and transitions in Athens in the post-dictatorship era (1974-). TransCity offers transition as a conceptual bridge to bring together phenomenological experiences of gender transition, processes of urban transition, and narratives of political economic transition in times of multiple, intersecting crises.
On the basis of this open call, we will invite 10 participants to present their work, engage in discussions, offer and receive feedback, share the joy of a transfeminist space, and be exposed to the beauty of anti-authoritarian, radical trans theory, poetics, and struggles, together with invited participants Marquis Bey, Trish Salah, Alyosxa Tudor, and the TransCity research team. A public plenary discussion with the invited participants will take place on Saturday, 7 October 2023 in the evening.
Call closes on 28 August 2023 at 11:59 pm.
More information: https://feministresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/FNBSS-2023-CfP.pdf
The open call closes on 24 March 2023, 11:00 a.m. Athens time.
The festival’s production is exclusively funded by self-organised events and an international online fundraising campaign and without corporate sponsorship. All funds gathered will go towards supporting the performers and to cover the technical set-up. The organisational team of the festival are volunteering their time. The festival will take place on the 18,19,20 of October 2019 at the KET space in Kypseli, Athens.
Open Call:
Please submit to [email protected]
Deadline: 15th of May 2019
We invite proposals for performances, lectures, performative lectures, workshops and video screenings that relate to the following:
- fluidity: gender, sexuality and performativity
- queer art of failure as criticism to the ultra-serious/existential narrative of an art history made of “men geniuses”
- trans narratives, history and futures
- feminism and new forms of education
- femininities: expression, performativities and visibility
- queer parenthood
- anti-hellenism: neoliberalism, greekness, national marches and macedonian halva
- black embodiment, resistance, afrofuturism
- fatness: feminisms, hyper/invisibility, excess
- theories of “health” and well-being and the mechanisms of pathologisation
- opportunist “queerometers” and thoughts on the reappropriation and institutionalisation of queer issues
- bdsm, taboo, (post)pornography
- towards a new resistance: queer communism and queer anarchy
- counter violence, high heel kicks and/or molotov cocktails
- internalised sexism
- games as a form of queer expression
- anti-art, over identification and subversive affirmation strategies against the new dystopian reality of post-truth
- the limits and shortcomings of queer and identity politics
- street (in)security and self-defense
- the crossroads between spectacle and political critique
- queer mourning and collective trauma
* For the selected proposals from abroad we will organise solidarity accommodation lists and we will also suggest queer-friendly houses/spaces. The Athens Festival of Queer Performance is against the gentrification waves of AirBnb practices.
The Short Course is co-organised by members of Feminist Researchers Against Borders, a network of academics and activists, and will be held at the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research in Athens. Following the 2-day taster workshop held in July 2018 at the National Technical University of Athens, the short course will continue to lay the groundwork for the launch of the full, ten-day summer school in June 2020. Designed in a participatory, experimental manner across 3 years, the Feminist No Borders summer school is imagined as a space of emergent politics and creative socialities. Participants will develop their familiarity with intersectional feminist methodologies, no borders framework, decolonial theory, and queer arts and performance practice, by working collaboratively with community experts, organisers, artists, scholars, from all over the world, and those experiencing and struggling against injustice in their daily lives.
The theme for this year’s Short Course is “Inhabiting the Borderlands.” Inspired by the visionary words of Gloria Anzaldúa, her commitment to interconnectedness, and her own praxis of dismantling borders to survive borderlands, tarrying with ambiguity to heal open wounds. Anzaldúa defined writing as “gestures of the body.” We will experiment with this idea, considering what it might mean for our political practices, our writing and other creative practices, and our relationships with each other to be shaped by a deeper interconnection with our embodiment.
In-person at the Feminist Autonomous Centre for research in Athens. Facilitated by Valentina Azarova & Anna Carastathis
The open call closes on December 11, 2023.
Instructor: Anna Carastathis
Course dates: October 4 to December 6, 2022
Location: FAC (in person)
Languages: Greek and English (passive bilingualism)
Call closes on September 27, 2022