Queer subjectivities within political scenes: Traumatic relations, exposed vulnerabilities

Abstract

This article examines the lives of queer people as performed in the biographies of ten interlocutors who participated in the queer political scene during the decade 2000–10. In recent years, a wide range of queer/feminist subjectivities, groups and spaces have emerged within collective social movements in Greece. These new approaches to radical feminism and queer life-forms often convey a sense of discontinuity with the recent past, as queer voices have been marginalized in the anti-authoritarian and the radical leftist political scene until recently. I argue that the anti-authoritarian and leftist political space in and around the various social grassroots movements constituted – in their own right – disciplinary fields as well as gender-constructing mechanisms. Gendered subjectivities, either entirely excluded or included on restrictive terms, exposed the limits of the political body. In this article, I explore how these new queer contexts can work through the traumas out of which they have emerged, and I argue that the emergence of a queer political scene in Greece signals a shift from passionate attachments to new modes of relationality. These new modes of relating expose vulnerabilities and emerge as negotiations of intimacy between the self and the other.