Zone of Passions: a Queer Re-imagining of Cyprus’s “No Man’s Land” (original) (raw)
Related papers
Queering the soil: Reimagining landscape and identity in queer artistic practices in Cyprus
Image&Text, 2022
This article concentrates on the work of artists who identify as queer in Cyprus, a place marked by colonialism, rival nationalisms and ethno-political division. More specifically, it examines the ways their work disrupts confining perceptions of nationhood, gender and sexuality that suppress difference and delimit identity in a conflict-ridden, ethnically divided society. These ideas are discussed in relation to the examples of Krista Papista, a Greek Cypriot visual artist, musician and performer, and Hasan Aksaygın, a Turkish Cypriot artist, whose work encompasses elements of painting, performance and installation. As I argue in this article, by calling forth interpretations of "queer" that go beyond the term's common application as an adjective or a noun, these artists employ tactics of queer use. In so doing, they inscribe queer life and experiences into landscapes, traditions and symbols, as in "over" the soil, used here as a metaphor to point to those elements that are commonly invoked in delineating the physical and imaginary topos of the nation from which people identifying as queer are often excluded as non-conforming others. As such, they make space for an alternative topos to emerge, where expanded notions of gender, identity and belonging are cultivated away from established stereotypes and divisive, nationalist narratives.
Towards a poetics of the ‘Dead Zone’ of Nicosia
Nicosia, a medieval walled city in Cyprus, was divided by a ‘green line’ in 1964, again in 1974, and remains the last divided capital city in Europe. While the border between the two communities was opened in 2003 the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities live separated by a ‘dead zone’. This paper explores how the ‘dead zone’ works as a site of memory and its attendant forgettings. The aesthetics of the fragment and its multiplication, and an eclectic elision between diverse genres and discursive practices from philosophy to poetry and the multimedia image/text provide a rationale or methodology for a self-reflexive understanding of collective and individual memory. I will argue for a discourse of memory studies as a site for practice that both examines what memory processes and technologies are and how they might be employed to erode calcified repressive recollections; in this instance the memory-narratives that perpetuate enmity and political deadlock in the Cypriot context.
The purpose of this article is twofold: firstly, an autoethnographic account of Cypriot poetics considers the extent to which language, literature and translation have played a crucial, often destructive and sometimes transformative part in the formation of postcolonial Cypriot identities and poetics; secondly, the article examines how contemporary Anglophone writers in/of Cyprus redefine Cypriot literary canons, languages and territories. This redefinition enables a new transformative poetics to occur, or, as Deleuze and Guattari would have it, a process of ‘becoming-minor’ as an act of radical deterritorialisation can be initiated. To speak of politics and poetry at the border between the Republic of Cyprus and the unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is to write from the border between languages, between myth and memory, as well as between politically defined territories; moving through rather than only thinking about the politics of poetics. If Cypriotness is to travel beyond a memory or fantasy of Cyprus before its division, the first step is to refuse to accept the authority of chronological and hierarchical national narratives of official canons in favour of the diverse deterritorialised compendium as an anti-canon. This means making an attempt to disrupt oppressive dominant narratives, not by replacing or erasing them (the repressed returns), but by weaving new routes through the old ruins and living in the spaces between these routes. Keywords: autoethnography; memory; borders; Dead Zone; no man’s land; deterritorialisation; Cypriot literature
Queer in Cyprus: National Identity and the Construction of Gender and Sexuality
Kamenou, Nayia. 2011. “Queer in Cyprus: National Identity and the Construction of Gender and Sexuality.” In Queer in Europe: Contemporary Case Studies (Queer Interventions Series), edited by Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett (Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate), 25-40, 2011
The Republic of Cyprus (RoC) is an economically advanced, nominally secular and multicultural European democratic state, which claims to respect human rights pertaining to diversity. Nevertheless, Cypriot society is deeply divided along national, ethnic, racial, sex, gender and sexuality lines. Thus, it is particularly instructive for demonstrating how nationalism relates to gender and sexuality in nationalistic, ethnically divided, postcolonial and traditional milieus. At the same time the Cypriot microcosm functions as a window on injustices that take place elsewhere in the name of national prerogatives, in a globalized and amalgamating world. Additionally, it exhibits how relatively recent phenomena such as Europeanization – ‘a process of structural change, variously affecting actors and institutions, ideas and interests’ (Featherstone 2003: 3) – and external policies, laws and trends promote or inhibit certain subjectivities’ inclusion in – or exclusion from – the body of the nation and from the dominant socio-political culture. Accordingly, this chapter will address the questions: a) How are gender and sexuality subjectivities constructed in Cyprus and what is their relationship to national identity and to other predominant discourses? b) How are ‘human rights’ and ‘Europe’ conceptualized and how do lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans* and queer (LGBTQ) rights operate in the Cypriot context? c) What strategies are needed in order for alternative identities to flourish and for European and global LGBTQ legal developments to be substantially applied on the local level? d) What role might queer theory play – or not play – in milieus where a strategically identity-based LGBTQ movement seems to offer the best hope for affecting societal and political change?
Living Archives and Cyprus: Militarized Masculinities and Decolonial Emerging World Horizons
Critical Military Studies , 2017
ABSTRACT Huddled within the most influential theorisations and praxes of war and violence are imaginations of collating masculinities, texts and their embodiments. Interpreting and reading my mother as a non-dominant body, and her stories about war, violence, and Cyprus as re-iterative corporeal insights and practices challenging such toxic masculinities, I argue that such performances and embodiments (what I call living archives), albeit with multiple tensions, re-orient us to emerging decolonial horizons. In doing so, I directly challenge and unsuture the complacent IR historiographies of security and war and the ways they insist on composing and writing by bringing together certain archives (i.e., images of violent places and state documents) and silencing those which systematically and consistently point to modernity’s violent frameworks including their production of violent masculinities on which extinguishment and futures lie. Such an insistence colludes with certain toxic regimes of representation expecting certain subjects, sovereigns, and institutions to order and reiterate (produce) colonial and violent racialized masculine (and racialized feminized) practices between ourselves and the world. Living archives are also those invented signs, imaginations, and excesses that press materiality and its impasses (i.e., in the form of capture, blackness, non-genders, etc. and resolution of signs and fictions), exposing the limits of modernity’s fictioning, and against any resolution and labor that produces violence all the while sublating it.
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2019
This article assigns the literary as the preferred means to write Cyprus because it captures the powerful “truth” of space and place, which exposes the dominant binary so as to generate solidarity between deeply divided and displaced people in postcolonial partitioned cases like Cyprus. The focus is on literatures of Cyprus or literary Cyprus, which can be defined as a transnational world-literature, wherein all the texts are colonial and postcolonial diasporic writings operating through a system of inequality and displacement, especially in relation to literary, cultural, and language centres and peripheries that are outside. This is demonstrated through a survey of literary Cyprus, with particular emphasis on the cypriotgreek and cypriotturkish diasporic identification developed during the last years of British colonial and particularly postcolonial partitioned Cyprus. This is an examination of the literary and lived practices of Stephanos Stepahnides, Aydin Mehmet Ali, and Alev A...
The Cypriot Affect: The First Pride Parade in Cyprus and the Queering of Cypriot Culture
InterAlia 17, 2022
In May 2014 the first ever Gay Pride Parade was held with tremendous success in Cyprus, a society that is still by-and-large very conservative. At the same time, in an adjacent street, the powerhouse that is the Greek Orthodox Church, organised a counter-parade comprising of far-right individuals, nuns and priests which, both in terms of numbers and influence, failed spectacularly. This paradox spurred a wave of analyses and examination of the way in which Cypriot society and culture seem to be changing until today, 7 years later, engaged as it would seem in a queering process, as well as on issues such as gay activism and civil partnership. My article analyses the ways in which the Parade’s expressed queer desire and the participants’ performativity starting in 2014, gesture towards a significant socio-political change in Cyprus. This analysis is largely based on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of desire as a machine that generates reality, as I approach the Parade’s “queerness” as an expression of Cypriot society’s polyvalent socio-political manifestations which intentionally include the disenfranchised and provide new answers to questions of belonging. It is ultimately argued that, the way in which performative imagination seems to be able to generate reality, gestures towards a better understanding of the weak points of a dominant structure, becoming thus much more influential than the way in which Michel Foucault understands the notion of “power”. In other words, that the participants’ actions, choices and played-out desires lead to a final, dual performance that is the Parade and the counter-parade on the “stage” that is Cyprus. The Parade’s cultural performativity then, can be read as a site of vital performances, a kind of Bakhtinian carnivalesque that can lead to an understanding of a new socio-political identity which entails hope for the future. Thus, the dynamics of non-heteronormative sexual identities in Cyprus and their political potentials are explored vis-à-vis their capacity to interrogate hegemonic discourses, all of which gestures towards the queering of Cypriot culture.
An architecture of forgetting: towards a poetics of the 'Dead Zone' of Nicosia
Nicosia, a medieval walled city in Cyprus, was divided by a ‘green line’ in 1964, again in 1974, and remains the last divided capital city in Europe. While the border between the two communities was opened in 2003 the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities live separated by a ‘dead zone’. This paper explores how the ‘dead zone’ works as a site of memory and its attendant forgettings. The aesthetics of the fragment and its multiplication, and an eclectic elision between diverse genres and discursive practices from philosophy to poetry and the multimedia image/text provide a rationale or methodology for a self-reflexive understanding of collective and individual memory. I will argue for a discourse of memory studies as a site for practice that both examines what memory processes and technologies are and how they might be employed to erode calcified repressive recollections; in this instance the memory-narratives that perpetuate enmity and political deadlock in the Cypriot context. The statement “I don’t forget” is emblazoned across Greek children’s school exercise books, the promise “we will not forget” is used in official propaganda on the Turkish side. Yet the official memories of each community are at odds: what is to be remembered, and how, is politically controversial and fiercely contested. The memories of individuals vary and both confirm and contradict the official rhetorics of their politicians. In such an environment certain kinds of memory and ways of remembering, become ideologically coded, over-signified activities. When considering what might be an appropriate research methodology for the study of memory we find ourselves faced with both different contexts or arenas of memory: the institutional, demotic, collective, and individual; which speak in the academy from a range of disciplines from philosophy to political theory, anthropology, sociology, history, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, psychology, to literary and film theory. Here I want to consider the border that divides Nicosia, as both what Nora would term a lieux and a contested milieux de memoire (of war, of childhood, of Cypriot identities), and in the process challenge disciplinary and discursive boundaries between theory and autobiography through a poetics of reverie (Bachelard) which uses both text and image.
Sexuality, gender and the (re)making of modernity and nationhood in Cyprus
Women's Studies International Forum, 2019
This article studies Cypriot LGBs' identity construction processes and understandings of politics amidst the sociopolitical environment within which they are articulated. It does so by addressing a question that is central to gender and sexuality research: How are gender and sexual identities formed, and how do these formations inform gender and sexuality politics in contexts caught between tradition and modernity? Employing a qualitative research design, it thematically analyzes data from interviews with Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot LGBs. It marks intra-ethnic and interethnic in-group exclusions. It argues that these exclusions are reinforced by local notions about modernity, expressed through the “Europe/west–versus the–rest” opposition. Nonetheless, it also finds that the successes of the Cypriot LGBTI movement have been based on opportunities created by Europeanization. Therefore, it helps develop our understanding of the implications of conceptions of nationhood, gender, and sexuality on gender and sexuality politics where the “rest” meets the “west.” KEYWORDS: Gender, Sexuality, Identity, Politics, Modernity, Cyprus