This article explores how photographic images of refugees in modern Greece condition national imagination and construct new ethnopolitical moral fantasies. It also examines how repetitive images of suffering in photographic exhibitions become constitutive of a new regime of mobility in the country during the financial and refugee crisis. I argue that refugees’ images articulate kinship and gender norms, national archetypes, ethnic hierarchies, and ideas of mobility and rootedness. They bind together northern European landscapes and resistant Mediterranean subjects and weave new and old visualities into a single mobility aesthetic that reinvents national memory and initiates new political moralities.
The present article examines women’s narratives concerning the COVID-19 pandemic experience in Athens, Greece. The spacetime contexts that women construct to situate this experience involve the city and the house, the former involving historical and cosmological temporalities, and the second a ritualized domestic tempo that gradually becomes disorganized. In these spatiotemporal formations women develop performative acts of individuality and singularity that end up as explorations of mainly ungendered, bodily selves that exist in the emptiness of a short-term, suspended pandemic present.
Abstract:The present article explores the relationship of silences, as vocal and non-vocal bodily practices, to forms of power in religion and work. More specifically, it focuses on Filipina domestic workers in Greece who are members of Iglesia ni Cristo, an independent Filipino church. In the hierarchical contexts of the church and paid domestic work, where the church expands its influence, silence is a dominant embodied religious ethos, an ideal behavior for female workers and an expression of obedience. This silence enhances women's subordination resulting in strict power relationships. Silencing the body, however, is also an agential practice of Filipina immigrants themselves, a tool to transform power relationships into more reciprocal ones. By reflective and unreflective practices of bodily silence, migrant Filipinas reverse subjection, transform the power relationships in which they are involved and attribute to them a more relational character.
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