Un/Doing Queerness in the European South: Crises/Critique/Grammars of Resistance
Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing
Speakers:
Maria Boletsi (University of Amsterdam/Leiden University)
Vera Gheno (Università degli Studi di Firenze)
Maria Boletsi (University of Amsterdam / Leiden University), ‘Grammar and/as Infrastructure: Revisiting the Politics of the Middle Voice in “Post-Crisis” Greece’
In conditions of chronic crisis –what Lauren Berlant called ‘crisis ordinariness’– binary modes of framing situations and subjects become particularly pronounced: perpetrators versus victims, guilty versus innocent, powerful versus powerless. Contesting the rigidity of such normative frameworks requires more than a shift in vocabularies: we need to talk about grammars of crisis and critique. Here, I approach grammars as infrastructures that can reproduce normative conditions but can also generate critical, queer, utopian potentialities for reparative imaginaries and alternative modes of sociality. I seek to establish a connection between grammatical categories and social infrastructures by focusing on the middle voice, taken both as a grammatical category and conceptual infrastructure that antagonizes binary modes of subjectivization and introduces ambivalence and nonsovereign forms of relationality. In my previous work, I scrutinized the political promise of the middle voice through its mobilization in wall writings that appeared in Greece during the so-called crisis decade (2009-2018). In this talk, I revisit some of these wall writings from our present, in 2024, to ponder how the kind of agency, critique, and sociality the middle voice enables may work in the purported ‘post-crisis’ era in Greece. While some of these wall writings resonate today as part of the cultural memory of the ‘crisis decade’, others continue to pop up (though less frequently), challenging the ‘post’ in ‘post-crisis’ as reminders of Greece’s continuing failing infrastructures (of which the 2023 train crash at Tempi is but one striking example). How does the middle voice in these wall writings intervene in the context of neoliberal narratives of ‘happiness’, ‘rebuilding’, ‘growth’, and ‘return to normality’ that right-wing governmental rhetoric has promoted since 2018? How can it provide alternative infrastructures – understood as ‘practices that hold the world up’ and are made ‘from within relation’ (Berlant) – for those excluded from national narratives and the claim to ‘happiness’: queer subjects, migrants, refugees, the marginalized, impoverished, disabled? The middle voice, I argue, can be involved in politics of refusal of national or neoliberal narratives of ‘good life’ by pointing towards alternative political desires, (utopian) projects, queer imaginaries, and modes of ‘being in common’ - in Greece and beyond.
Vera Gheno (Università degli Studi di Firenze, ‘“Is There a Problem with Italian? ”: The Challenges of a Binary Language Facing a Fluid Reality’
With the progressive emergence of awareness of the existence of non-binary people, the Italian language, like many other languages with grammatical gender, found itself facing a gap between what linguistic binarism manages to represent and a much more complex human nature. At what point are we today, in Italy, in the process of linguistic representation of gender?
Date of event: 21 May 2024