Gender in Resistance

Abstract

This chapter examines the relations between the city, social movements, and the commons through a case study of the anti-authoritarian/ anarchist commons in Athens, in order to illustrate how the affective and collective labour of resistance by groups within these movements contributes to the city's social reproduction. It draws from the work of both Greek and other feminist scholars on the impact of the neoliberal governance of austerity in Greece and on the gender dynamics of social protest and resistance. The chapter argues that the affective labour of social reproduction and other practices of collective care and well-being within activist communities are gendered and vital to the social reproduction of resistance in a neoliberalizing city during austerity, creating safe spaces against dispossession, state violence, and police brutality as well as against a patriarchal oppression rooted in Greek society.