CIVIS gender studies lectures: Growing up Queer in contemporary Greece - Tactics of everyday life

This webinar is part of the CIVIS gender studies lectures, organised by the CIVIS Gender Studies Network (CGSN). It aims to bring together and make visible ongoing gender research carried out in the CIVIS member universities.

Growing Up Queer In Contemporary Greece: Tactics of Everyday Life

26 April 2023, 17:00 CET

Based on thirty-five in-depth interviews with adult queer youth and two-year fieldwork in the Athenian queer scene, I explore patterns of resistance in childhood and adolescence. Since the bulk of research concerning queer youth’s early and school years tends to emphasize victimization and exclusions, I place emphasis on the creative practices they employ in order to develop their subjectivities and avoid abjectification. I argue that throughout their early years, even before they identify as queer, the subjects devise agentic cultural practices in order to resist heteronormative ways of growing up. These cultural practices are “tactics”, drawing from de Certeau’s theory of using time to undermine dominant cultural systems and suggest that queer youth might grow sideways, troubling heteronormative notions of developmental and linear time, childhood, and innocence.

Speaker

Yulie Papadakou is a PhD candidate at the Department of Early Childhood Education, University of Athens. Her research focuses on queer youth socialities in contemporary Athens by exploring uses of time and emerging generational conceptualisations of age, gender, and sexuality.

Registration

This webinar is open to all the CIVIS community (students, academics and staff).

The webinar will take place digitally on Zoom on 26 April at 17:00 CET, hosted by Minerva - Laboratory on diversity and Gender Inequality at Sapienza Università Di Roma.

To receive a Zoom link and passcode, please register before the seminar by writing to: emil.edenborg@gender.su.se