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Cruising the Post-Ottoman: Transgender Bodies, Disciplinary Borders, and Racialized Assemblages in Northern Greece
Abstract
My project concerns the complex racialized assemblages surrounding the sexualized transgender woman’s body in Thessaloniki, Greece. Drawing inspiration from Sasho Lambevsky’s article “Suck My Nation,” and Sara Ahmed’s concept of “Race as Sedimented History,” as well as the work of Afsaneh Najmabadi and others on the field of Islamicate sexuality studies, I explore the idea of sedimented histories of nationalism that produced uneven forms of sexual modernity in northern Greece. Based on preliminary ethnographic fieldwork, I explore the complex ways in which Greek transgender women’s bodies are entangled with the bodies of other people on the margins of Greek society: Albanians, Roma, working-class Greeks and migrants. Bringing the historical literature on Islamicate sexuality studies into dialogue with contemporary realities in northern Greece, I aruge the following: (1) that multiple, overlapping, and conflicting temporalities and sexual epistemes converge around the figure of the sexualized transgender woman’s body, (2) that in order to account for these non-coeval sexualities, the field of Middle Eastern sexuality studies must look beyond the Foucauldian paradigm, and (3) that the question of the history of sexuality in northern Greece requires the fields of both Modern Greek Studies and Middle Eastern Studies to rethink their geopolitical and disciplinary boundaries and orthodoxies.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Balkans
Sub Area
Queer/LGBT Studies