Elsewheres: Greek LGBT activists and the imagination of a movement

Abstract

From twenty-six months of fieldwork conducted in Athens, Greece from May 2001 through July 2004, this dissertation documents the social and cultural contexts that shape the practices of activists working for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights in Greece. Those practices connect to conceptions of friendship, relations of patronage, informal democratic processes, the routinized suspicion of economic profit, and beliefs about the relationships between sexual identities and social identities. The practices in which the activists engage both restrict the kinds of successes they are able to enjoy, and enable those successes they do achieve. These practices are brought to bear by the activists both consciously and not. Furthermore, these practices draw on and are drawn from a diversity of places, times and realms of meaning beyond particular moments of activist practice---a diversity of locations termed elsewheres. Accounting for these elsewheres, which need not be non-Greek, not only provides insights into how Greek LGBT activists imagine the movement, but serves as an allegory of democratic values and processes at a micro-scalar level, an index of reactions to processes of Europeanization, and a study of the localized responses to globally circulating activist forms, sexual and gender identities, and modes of collectivity.