‘Out and about’: a haptic exploration of queer and feminist archives in post–dictatorship Greece

Gianniri, Lemonia (2023) ‘Out and about’: a haptic exploration of queer and feminist archives in post–dictatorship Greece. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis explores four magazines that emerged from autonomous groups in Athens concerning politics of desire and liberation: Amfi (Eng: dispute, 1978–1990), Skoupa (Eng: broom, 1979–1981), Kraximo (Eng: slating 1981–1993) and Lavrys (Eng: double–axe, 1982–1983). By mobilizing the notion of ‘the haptic’ as a tripartite sense of touch that involves: a physical, an indexical and an affective touch (Campt,2012), this research focuses on archival stories that emerged from a haptic reading. To navigate this haptic exploration I have structured the chapters as a written weave. Chapter 1 constitutes the first part of the warp where I discuss the sociocultural context of Greece and archives as sites of death and being. In chapter 2, as the second part of the warp based on first fieldwork impressions, I place the yarns of complexities when researching social movements; language intricacies; and nodes on desiring differently. Chapter 3 (the first of the weft) focuses on Skoupa and women’s ongoing struggle and I claim that the task of emotional memory is a necessary endeavour that requires our attention, then, now, and still. Chapter 4 weaves in the politics of Amfi and what I call: Anti–seriousness mobilization tactics. I argue that this formula of social mobilizations entail creativity and imagination as forms of resistance. In chapter 5 I introduce the aspect of the ‘optic’ and visual hapticality, to argue for some threads of fluorescent refusals that I encountered while reading Kraximo. In chapter 6 through 'touching stories’ found in Lavrys I discuss politics of love, intimacy, and difference. Chapter 7 brings impressions and tensions of the four magazines together in relation to space and Lefebvre’s concept of ‘right to the city’. Ultimately, I argue that stories of living and desiring differently from social relations of capital, inhabit an otherwise (Hartman, 2019) which illustrates everyday practices of imaginative will.

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