Is the crisis in Athens (also) gendered?: Facets of access and (in)visibility in everyday public spaces

Abstract

As the Greek crisis deepens and ‘recovery’ is constantly postponed to an unknown future, a dominant discourse seems to consolidate which focuses almost exclusively on macro-economic arguments and concerns. Other aspects of the crisis, among which are its gendered facets and unequal effects on women and men, rarely permeate the allegedly ‘central’ understandings. With the possible exception of unemployment which fares high among left-wing analysts, gender is thought to pertain to a ‘special’, that is, less important, matter which may detract from the ‘main problem’. The paper draws together a series of stories of ordinary women who have experienced deep changes in their everyday lives as a result of austerity policies (unemployment, precarity, salary and pension cuts, shrinking social rights, mounting everyday violence). It argues that emphasis on this scale ‘closest in’, linked in multiple ways to many other scales (local, national, European, international), reveals areas of knowledge that would otherwise remain in the dark; and that connecting concrete bodies with global processes enriches our understandings with more complex and more flexible variables and informs the ‘big pictures’ (in this case about the Greek crisis)—and not only the reverse.

Key words:

• gender
• Greek crisis
• urban violence
• unemployment
• resistance
• solidarity

Notes

1 The harsh austerity measures demanded by the so-called Troika have met the unquestioned approval and support of Greek banks and successive governments. Only the political Left, in its many facets and groupings, has strongly criticised and resisted them.

2 For alternative analyses, see among many Douzinas 2013, Tsakalotos and Laskos 2013, Papadopoulou and Sakellaridis 2012, Varoufakis 2011.

3 An exception here is unemployment, particularly of young women, to which I refer in the following section of the article.

4 One cleaner is a man and less than 25% in the administration of universities are men.

5 79% of women's employment concentrated in the service sector in 2009, which absorbed a high proportion of women with higher education.

6 See the recent survey by the Institute of Andrology on men's sexual behaviour: the agressor's profile is that of a man a little over 40, with intense job insecurity or unemployed – but also 17% well-off. These data match the elaboration of results from the SOS helpline of the General Secretariat of Equality, as well as more scant data on wife killings, collected by the ‘feministnet’ network.

Additional information

Dina Vaiou, Professor, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA).