Telling the Sudanese story in Athens through a gender lens

Abstract

This article analyses the part that gender negotiations are playing in the making of Sudanese identity in Athens at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In an attempt to define the Sudanese version of the Athenian story, Sudanese men and women who undertake collective action rework differentiate them from newcomers and other Africans. The vindication of Arabness requires boundary work in which women and men perform different tasks in order to get recognition and elaborate their mobility story. The positioning of the Sudanese in the ethnic constellation of Athens is made possible through a gendered division of symbolic and material labor that takes place within the frame of the Sudanese Women’s Association.

Keywords:

• Sudanese women
• gender
• femininities
• masculinities
• belonging
• migration
• Athens

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Marina Kalligianni and Marina Stathi for their help with data collection, to Professor Yota Papageorgiou for valuable comments on previous versions of this work to Thomas Georgiadis for technical assistance.

Notes

1. The Sudanese Community in Athens was composed of one thousand members at the time of the research. There are no official data concerning undocumented migrants or potential asylum-seekers originating from Sudan.

2. The issue of race was rarely mentioned during our fieldwork. The members of both the Sudanese Community and the Sudanese Women’s Association referred to racist attitudes of Greeks, but they insisted mainly on ‘coexistence in good terms’ before the massive arrival of immigrant flows. Our research ended before the electoral victory of Golden Dawn in 2012 and the banalization of racist attacks (see Bistis, 2013; Drydakis & Vlassis, 2010; Ellinas, 2013, 2014; Koronaiou & Sakellariou, 2013; Triandafyllidou & Kouki, 2014).

3. Decentralization is a highly debated issue in the domain of governance, health care, development, and education (Saltman, Bankauskaite, & Vrangbaek, 2007). In this debate, privatization happens to be thought of as a strategy that needs further definition. The use of this metaphor by Tamir is very telling, provided that it touches upon the bipolar systems of femininity/privacy vs. masculinity/publicity that is salient in gender studies.

4. According to Hale (1996), there has been a social discourse about the need for ‘emancipated’ women in the making of the Sudan and both secularists and Islamists work to develop a gender ideology wherein women are central in socializing the nation.

5. The right to family life for migrant domestic workers is analyzed by Kontos (Kontos, 2013) (2013). For a discussion of the de-skilling process of migration, see Erel’s work (Erel, 2009).

6. ‘Not to Racism from baby’s cot’ is a campaign advocating the attribution of citizenship rights to immigrants' children. It was launched in 2005 by the United African Women’s Association and through networking with civic society groups and NGOs, they raised awareness over second-generation citizenship rights regarding legal status (Karantinos & Anna, 2010).

7. The same strategy is deployed by North African Immigrants in order to cope with French racism (Lamont, Morning, & Mooney, 2002).