Sexual Politics of Austerity: Queer Movements and Marxism in Contemporary Greece

During the last years, Greece has implemented an unprecedented number of austerity measures affecting every domain of social, economic and political aspect of the population’s life. Together with several social movements acting during this time against austerity, queer groups found a fertile ground to explore their discourses and practices by adopting an enlarged agenda of claims, attacking simultaneously gender hierarchizations and the rise of neo-Nazism, both accentuated after austerity measures.

This paper focuses on ‘sexual politics of austerity’ seen from the side of queer anti-authoritarian groups in the country’s biggest cities. Based upon an empirical exploration of queer groups’ discursive production in Athens and Thessaloniki, the paper shows how these groups attempt to create their own, autonomous space as a response to the politics of austerity and how this queer discourse adapts to new reconfigurations of the austerity-driven nation. It is obvious queer groups base their own political production on a queer reading of traditional classical Marxism, and in particular its idea on ‘totality’. By queering ‘totality’, queer activists do not deny the importance of the crisis on the lives of sexual dissidents, but they also attempt to articulate its connections with the intensification of gender, race and sexual hierarchizations. Moreover, their own queer reading of Marxism comes as a response to the dominant orthodox Marxian conceptions of the Greek anti-authoritarian movement, in which queer groups participate.