How Intersectionality (can) trouble and question feminist struggles in contemporary Greece and Italy? (original) (raw)

Abstract

This paper aims to bring to light, in a transnational and comparative perspective, the ways in which feminist struggles in Greece and Italy take (or not) in our times into account the imbrication of social power relations of class, gender and race. We focus on these two countries of the South Europe, as both of them are currently seriously impacted – especially Greece – by economic and political crisis as a result of austerity policies. Meanwhile, it is necessary to point out their central role in European and National borders politics as receiving and transit countries for immigration flows/circulations . Hence, taking into consideration the socio-political context, where migration has updated the power relation of race and the traditional class approach has undergone a profound transformation, and considering at the same time the genealogy of feminist movements, we aspire to problematize the political reception and the attempts of conceptualisation of intersectionality as critical theory and approach outside its original context. Departing from our research and struggle experiences, we are going to make an assessment of the political and methodological uses of intersectionality in both the university and the feminist movements to look for answers to challenging interrogations: how feminist politics have been transformed under the influence of these transformations in process? And how feminist politics are reconfigured within/via an intersectional reflection? Can we consider intersectionality a new entrance in the arsenal of feminist struggles? We argue that intersectionality debates can radically trouble and question the tradition and the present of feminist struggles in contemporary Greece and Italy. Reflecting from the meaning that Afro-Caribbean poet Audre Lorde gave to the “differences between women”, we try to investigate the ways in which feminist movements can negotiate and built new forms of solidarity on the base of intersectionality.

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