‘Black girlhood and emerging sexual identities: sexual citizenship and teenage girls of African descent in Athens’

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses data from interviews with young girls (13-23) of African descent and is part of our larger research programme, entitled ‘AfroGreek Cultures in Athens’. In it we wish to offer an exploratory mapping of African women’s and girls’ lived experiences in Greece. Given that women of colour usually have to wrestle with derogatory assumptions and stereotypes about their character and identity, in order to preserve their true selves and secure recognition as citizens, we would like to investigate the everyday practices and experiences of African teenage girlhood in Greece. What can African teenage girls tell us about how they see themselves within Greek society and their own community? To what extent certain patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies and power relationships about sexuality, religion, family, self-regulation, popular culture, are (unwittingly) internalized, and passed on to the next generation of young African girls in Greece? For the purposes of this article, we focus on how our participants accounted for the constructions of femininity within the African community; technologies of sexiness; managing one’s sexual conduct; and parental control.

KEYWORDS:

• Afrogreek cultures
• African girlhood
• sexuality
• aesthetic labour
• postfeminism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. People of Colour (POC) have gained visibility within the broader public sphere in Greece during the past decade, especially in sports (basketball, football, volleyball), in performing arts and the music industry, in television and the culinary urban culture of Athens, as well as in small neighbourhood businesses (hair salons and barber shops, retail, mini-markets)..

2. Founded in 1889, with the aim to cater for the needs of orphaned and in-need-of-a-home girls in Greece, Chatzikiriakio offers accommodation, care, emotional support and educational services to girls from families in financial and social adversity, aged six and above, regardless of ethnic and national origin..

3. Related informal conversation by one of our contacts, between themselves and a reluctant female interviewee.

4. Personal communication of the researchers with the African representative at hand.

5. Especially when we take into account the proliferation of media accounts about Black women prostitutes across Athens (Athens Voice magazine, 20.06.2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Liza Tsaliki

Liza Tsaliki is Professor at the Department of Communication and Media Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her research record spans across political engagement and participation (including young peoples’); celebrity culture and activism; gender and technology; porn studies; children/youth and media; children/youth and sexualization; popular culture; post-feminism, body aesthetics, and motherhood; fitness culture. She is a member of the editorial board of Information, Communication, and Society and Convergence. She sat at the editorial board of the Journal of Porn Studies between 2013 and 2018. For more information, see https://tsalikiliza.wordpress.com/

Despina Chronaki

Despina Chronaki is an adjunct lecturer at the Department of Communication and Media Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her research focuses on audiences of popular culture, media ethics, porn studies, sexuality, and children’s experiences with media. Most of her publications focus on audiences’ constructions of popular culture, including children’s experiences as audiences of sexual content, media literacy, and ethics. Since 2007 she is collaborating with media scholars from around the world in a number of EU-funded European, National (Greek) and International projects and has been invited to present her work in domestic, European, and international conferences and meetings.

Olga Derzioti

Olga Derzioti holds an MSc in Gender, Media and Culture from the LSE and is a third-year PhD student at the NKUA Communications and Media Department. Her PhD is funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation and goes under the title “Transnational Queer Cinema: Expanding solidarity across borders – queering the global sexual rights regime”. Her research focuses on the newly emerging queer film production of both diasporic-exilic and non-western filmmakers and its ability to disrupt the unequal cultural flow and enable the formation of supportive queer communities based on the subjects’ shared experiences. Her work explores the cinematic representation of non-western queer subjects and their lived realities, in relation to questions of sexual citizenship and homonationalism. Her research interests include postcolonial feminist studies, transnational feminist epistemologies, sexuality and queer film studies.