Feminism in Cyprus: women’s agency, gender, and peace in the shadow of nationalism

ABSTRACT

This article explores the ways in which feminist and women’s agency is articulated in the Cypriot context through the paradigms of nationalism, peace, and conflict. It does so to broaden our understanding of gendered and peace agency in troubled and divided societies, in which complex and conflicting discourses meet. Analyzing data from interviews with feminist and women’s groups’ representatives, it examines how nationalism and women’s approaches to gender, politics, peace, and conflict enable or restrict feminist and women’s agency. It finds that a strategic essentialist approach has initiated a reconfiguration of gender(ed) power relations, women’s agency, and peacebuilding processes. It argues that when this approach is combined with feminist theory and praxis and the employment of transnational peace paradigms, the possibilities for feminist and women’s agency increase, as long as feminist scholarship and grassroots activism inform each other through dialogue. Therefore, it highlights the nuanced and complex dialectic between essentialist and anti-essentialist feminist gender discourses. Moreover, it challenges theories that posit a rigidly hierarchical relation between local and transnational gendered and peace agency paradigms, by demonstrating their malleability and reciprocity. Thus, it contributes to the debate about the modalities and possibilities of feminist sociopolitical intervention in nationalism- and conflict-ridden contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Cyprus
• feminism
• gender
• nationalism and peace
• women’s agency

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all of the research participants for sharing their perspectives and experiences with me. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Nayia Kamenou is a VC2020 Senior Lecturer in the School of Applied Social Sciences at De Montfort University. Her research broadly focuses on gender and sexuality.

Notes

1 Participant 213644, interview with author, Nicosia, August 2, 2017.

2 http://www.peace-cyprus.org/Womenbridges/.

3 http://www.cyprus.com.cy/womenwalkhome.htm.

4 http://www.gat1325.org/.

5 Participant 212527, interview with author, Nicosia, January 26, 2009.

6 http://www.pogocy.com/. Formed in the late 1930s as the women’s branch of the communist-leftist Progressive Party for the Working People.

7 Participant 210023, interview with author, Nicosia, January 13, 2009.

8 Participant 210029, interview with author, Nicosia, January 19, 2009.

9 Participant 213679, interview with author, Nicosia, September 5, 2017.

10 Participant 213653, interview with author, Nicosia, August 9, 2017.

11 Participant 213668, interview with author, Nicosia, August 8, 2017.

12 Nonetheless, such postliberal feminist discourses may also challenge the possibilities of peace, as they do not always and/or fully evade the (neo)liberal project’s notion of “peace” and its accompanying capitalist funding structures (Agathangelou and Spira 2007; Agathangelou and Turcotte 2010; Trimikliniotis 2016).