On the Outside Looking In: Decolonising Queer-Inspired Discourses in Contemporary Athens, Greece

Abstract

My thesis contributes to anthropological literature on queer movements in Greece and the everyday experiences of young queer people in the (post)crisis era. In doing so, my thesis engages with and contributes to feminist studies as they intersect with decolonial critique. Decoloniality in the context of Greece is understood with reference to Greece’s theorisation as a crypto-colony (Herzfeld, 2002), which focuses on financial dependence and the concept of modernisation as colonial elements in the absence of official colonial occupation. Building from that work, I approach modern activistic queer-inspired discourses as an ethnographic concept that should be seen in the context of Greece as a cryptocolony. I argue that queer discourses in Greece entail some hegemonic aspects that are often ignored due to their emancipatory elements and potentials. More specifically, popular queer discourses in Greece are filtered through transnational NGOs and social media. I argue that both can operate as hegemonic apparatuses in the sense that they foreground an ethnocentric and often neoliberal version of queer theory that does not take into account the local context with its socio-economic specificities. As such, young queer people in Greece are often caught in a modern cross-fire between the heteropatriarchal violence to be often found in local discourses and the hegemonic global assimilation of popular queer discourses understood as discourses of modernity and progress. I am making this argument partly through ethnographic exploration of a Greek LGBT+ NGO. The group will feature in my work as a means through which to explore the concept of NGO-ification. This concept describes the gradual power that transnational NGOs have in shaping gender and sexuality emancipatory politics in contemporary Greece.