Borders Retold: The entanglements between women's bodies and the Cyprus's Green Line (original) (raw)
Related papers
2011
The aim of the paper is to investigate the position of the transient in its il/legal immigrant, colonised, refugee forms, particularly through the mestiza. These porous bodies exist in a world that attempts to create borders, both physical, legal and geographical, which has lead to an increasing number of spaces where states of exceptions preside and a borderland consciousness has emerged. These marginalised and liminal spaces deserve analytical attention not only for what they reveal of the people that exist within them but, also, what they expose of the people who exist outside of the liminal. The human is clearly not conceived within human rights as these “rights” are not equally given over to all human beings. It would seem that one is only truly human if others recognise the individual as human; therefore, human- ity is conditional and not guaranteed. Agamben’s notion of the homo sacer, Avery Gordon’s ghost and Achille Mbembe’s shadow are all theories explicated in this paper to define those marginalised, subjugated and cut off from a world of human recognition. Using Agamben’s state of exception and camp, Mbembe’s colony, Anzaldúa’s borderland and Coutin’s space of nonexistence, the spaces and states in which those without rights are situated are analysed and revealed to demonstrate the sheer number of those considered sub-human, non-human or homo sacer. The paper concludes with a suggestion of how human rights and equality can be bolstered through a post-humanist feminism based upon Braidotti’s philosophical nomadism via feminist protest and Andzaldúa’s autohistorias.
Being and Becoming: the body and border landscapes
Tabacalera Promoción del Arte, Madrid, Spain, 2017
Essay published in the catalog for the fine art exhibition "Where is Diana?" at Tabacalera Promoción del Arte, Madrid, Spain. June 2017. Diana Coca, in her exhibition Where is Diana? uses landscape and performance to invite the viewer to contemplate the relationship between the body, systems of control and the construction of the subject in the contexts of national borders and globalization. The movement of people across national boundaries has been accelerated by an integrated world economy, and in recent years, by war, terrorism and organized crime violence. Today about 244 million people, or 3.3 percent of all people in the world, live outside of their country of origin. Another 40 million people live as refugees in their own country, having fled war, extortion or local gang violence. These internally displaced persons often go unrecognized by international support systems designed for refugees. Nation-states have responded with new techno-social controls and enhanced surveillance systems to manage border crossing, and the result is that our bodies have become sites of multiple encoded boundaries. Coca takes up this problem of bodies and codes of state control, and through her own travel, she places borders and border crossing at the center of her artistic practice. Having completed residencies in Beijing, China and in Mexico City and Tijuana, Mexico, she creates a series that enacts the time-space compression characteristic of the postmodern condition and uses her images to stage the disorientation and violence of the protocols of state regulation of migrant mobilities. Her images of a lone black-clad figure in the landscape are both exhilarating and unsettling, linking disparate spaces through the migration and presence of the same singular figure. The landscape and the figure alike suggest alienation and the disintegration of identities that were once rooted in particular histories and specific local places.
To cross or not to cross? Subjectivization and the absent state in Cyprus
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2007
This article is an ethnographic exploration of the process through which citizens come to conceptualize their identities as political subjects in rapidly changing contexts. The focus of the article is the lifting, in 2003, of a ban on crossing between the northern and southern parts of the island of Cyprus, which had been instituted in 1974. The article examines how this new political change affected state rhetoric, and concentrates on the reactions of Greek-Cypriot citizens to this shift. These data are related to the wider discussion on the political theory of subjectivity and the concept of ‘event’, where, it is argued, anthropology has a significant contribution to make.This article is an ethnographic exploration of the process through which citizens come to conceptualize their identities as political subjects in rapidly changing contexts. The focus of the article is the lifting, in 2003, of a ban on crossing between the northern and southern parts of the island of Cyprus, which had been instituted in 1974. The article examines how this new political change affected state rhetoric, and concentrates on the reactions of Greek-Cypriot citizens to this shift. These data are related to the wider discussion on the political theory of subjectivity and the concept of ‘event’, where, it is argued, anthropology has a significant contribution to make.RésuméLe présent article est une exploration ethnographique des processus par lequel les citoyens en viennent à conceptualiser leurs identités comme sujets politiques dans des contextes de changements rapides. Il est centré sur l'abolition, en 2003, de l'interdiction de passage imposée en 1974 entre les parties Nord et Sud de l'île de Chypre. L'auteur examine la manière dont ce nouveau changement politique a affecté la rhétorique étatique, et se concentre sur les réactions des Chypriotes Grecs à cette évolution. Ces données sont replacées dans un cadre de discussion plus large sur la théorie politique de la subjectivité et le concept « d'événement », auquel l'anthropologie peut, selon l'auteur, apporter une contribution importante.Le présent article est une exploration ethnographique des processus par lequel les citoyens en viennent à conceptualiser leurs identités comme sujets politiques dans des contextes de changements rapides. Il est centré sur l'abolition, en 2003, de l'interdiction de passage imposée en 1974 entre les parties Nord et Sud de l'île de Chypre. L'auteur examine la manière dont ce nouveau changement politique a affecté la rhétorique étatique, et se concentre sur les réactions des Chypriotes Grecs à cette évolution. Ces données sont replacées dans un cadre de discussion plus large sur la théorie politique de la subjectivité et le concept « d'événement », auquel l'anthropologie peut, selon l'auteur, apporter une contribution importante.
Decolonising the Cypriot Woman
D De ec co ol lo on ni is si in ng g t th he e C Cy yp pr ri io ot t W Wo om ma an n: : M Mo ov vi in ng g B Be ey yo on nd d t th he e R Rh he et to or ri ic c o of f t th he e C Cy yp pr ru us s P Pr ro ob bl le em m S SO OP PH HI IA A P PA AP PA AS ST TA AV VR RO OU U A Ab bs st tr ra ac ct t The long-term consequence of the Cyprus conflict referred to by the international community as the 'Cyprus problem' rests on the bodies of Cypriot women. Cypriot women's diverse experiences and roles in resistance of war and mobilisation of peace impacts post-conflict conditions. The issues relevant to Cypriot women in post-conflict who have experienced trauma and violence due to war, requires a practice and theory that goes beyond Western universal applicability. This study challenges capitalist heteronormative patriarchy and European models of civil society building that have kept Cypriot women on the margins. An investigation of Cypriot women's voices cross war zones in the documentary film entitled Women of Cyprus (Katrivanou and Azzouz, 2009) bring to light the impact of ethno-nationalism and ethnic divisions and the complexities of women's positionality in conflict. A transnational feminist perspective is used to advance theories of gender and serves as a critique for reconciliation in Cyprus. K Ke ey yw wo or rd ds s: : Decolonization, Cypriot women, conflict, transnational feminism, feminist epistemology, oral history, identity, nationalism, militarism, heteronormative patriarchy îÎÔ›Ì·Ó ÔÙ› ∫ ‡ÚÔÓ, ÓÄÛÔÓ ÙĘ \ AÊÚÔ‰›Ù·˜, ¥Ó' Ôî ıÂÏÍåÊÚÔÓ˜ Ó¤ÌÔÓ-Ù·È ıÓ·ÙÔÖÛÈÓ òEÚˆÙ˜, ¶¿ÊÔÓ ı' ±Ó ëηÙfiÛÙÔÌÔÈ ‚·Ú‚¿ÚÔ˘ ÔÙ·ÌÔÜ ®Ô·› ηڛ˙Ô˘ÛÈÓ ôÓÔÌ‚ÚÔÈ. -∂˘ÚÈ›‰Ë˜, µ¿Î¯Â˜(400 BCE) would I might go to Cyprus, island of Aphrodite, where the Erotes, bewitching goddesses of love, soothe the hearts of humankind, or to Paphos, rich and fertile, not with rain, but with the water of a hundred flowing mouths of a strange and foreign river -Euripides, Bacchae (400 BCE) 95 5_PAPASTAVROU 14-02-13 12:53 Σελίδα95
Area, 2015
This special section builds on recent scholarship on territory and borders to call for attention to the ways that bodies are central in their constitution. Through a wide range of case studies from the delivery room to Tahrir Square, the six contributors find territory and borders in unlikely places, and reveal new lines of inquiry through their explorations of the ways that bodies both are marked by territory and borders and take an active role in their making. The contributors bring together recent work on territory with literatures from a divergent set of literatures, including feminist geopolitics, queer theory and actor network theory, to build a case for an embodied and material understanding of the intersections of bodies, territory and borders. We argue that territory is made, in part, through bodies-an intimate geopolitics. Bodies challenge and subvert state control of territory, become vulnerable to violence due to state bordering practices, and experience and produce smaller-scale forms of territory in the refugee camp or hospital. Borders can limit our epistemological vision or expand it. Seeking to expand embodied nationalism and build on scholarship on globalisation that cuts across scale, we approach the body as an active, territorial agent in processes of border and territory-making. Here, territory becomes a versatile, but grounded and material, focal point, allowing for the embodied experiences of bordercrossers, but also for other racialised, gendered and sexualised bodies as they give birth or seek to build neighbourhoods.
Jadaliyya, 2013
Politics of Representation," 1989), makes apparent the construction of the Occident and the Orient in Zionist discourse, a critical project that she has also pursued in her book Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices(2006). In such books as Talking Visions , Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (with Robert Stam, 1994), and Race in Translation: Culture Wars Around the Postcolonial Atlantic (with Robert Stam, 2012), she unsettles and reinterprets the boundaries between "the West and the Rest," as well as between the global South and global North. We spoke with Ella Shohat in a Berlin restaurant about the politicization of culture and the culturalization of politics. Here she tackles such varied subjects as the intimate connections between Jewish and Muslim histories and culture and the debates over circumcision, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism, always in a sensitive and empathetic manner, while still retaining analytical distance and a sharp theoretical vision. Sérgio Costa (SC): As you know, politics in the post-war world was dominated by the presence of nation-states and intellectual debates were very much shaped by a feeling of national belonging. Intellectuals were, in a certain way, pressured to declare their loyalty to a single national state. Your biography and your oeuvre are very much in-between-between national belongings, between ethnic belongings, and without a fixed national position. Could you please tell us about your trajectory and how this in-between positionality has influenced your work? ES: After World War Two, with decolonization and partitions, life shifted for many communities.