How to you spell queer in greek?

Queer politics in Greece of crisis

We will talk about our understanding and thoughts around the newly emerging queer scene in Athens. We will focus on the introduction of the word queer in activist and academic circles and the debates surrounding it; and we will discuss it as a debate that raised issues of language politics as well as the homonationalist reactions that emerged.

It is only in the last decade that the word queer has entered the political lexicon in Greece. The collective QV1, that stands for Queericulum Vitae, was the first to use it. QV collectives use of queer in its name signified the politics they we were aspiring to create. In june 2005, when the first Gay Pride Parade was organized in Athens, QV launched its first issue of an electronic zine, in which the word queer was used only one time, in the intro of the zine and in latin characters. In that introductory text QV describes people with homosexual desires, transgender people and asks what are they? The answer is Ill tell you what they are. They are faggots, dykes and perverts. They are strange and weird. They are Queer2.

Further in the intro QV gives an account for why a word play with CV was used as the groups name and how the experiences of the collectives members will be used in the production of its politics. It seems that the members of the group used the term queer in the name of the collective, even though they did not use it to identify with and/or support the political analyses of their experiences. The group in other words introduced the term queer and invited the readers, for whom probably the term was unheard of, to understand and interpret it in the politics that were being
1 2

www.qvzine.net http://www.qvzine.net/teyxos1/intro.htm

produced by the various texts in the magazine. And this can be understood as a statement that says: we have politics of reference but we are producing something of our own by politicizing our experiences and sharing our thoughts and concerns about sexuality, family relations, discrimination, homophobia within the anarchist movement, which were some of the topics discussed in their zine. The content of the first QV zine can be read as a first attempt for the word queer to claim meanings. The experiences of the qv collectives members became a vessel for this process.

A year later, in 2006 Kostas Yannakopoulos, an academic anthropologist, edited the book Sexuality: theories and politics of anthropology, a book which translated for the first time the groundbreaking articles of Gale Rubin, Esther Newton, Judith Butler, Jeffrey Weeks and others. In the introduction of the book, Yannakopoulos discusses, the problem of translating the queer theory jargon into greek. He gives an account for decisions he made regarding the words gay, transsexual, transgender, queer. About queer he writes I chose to keep the term queer in English (latin characters) even though it is not being used in (greek) everyday language. The translation of the term in greek as periergo(strange),

allokoto(weird), that is already being used by some activists, does not attribute the burden of ostracism, the derogation that the word queer contains a word that has a secondary meaning of aderfi (faggot) but also generally the conceptual and political history of reappropriation of this derogatory term.3 Yannakopoulos acknowledges the lack of connotation of the word queer in the greek context and the shortcoming of having a greek word to translate the political tendency that

Yannakopoulos K, 2006, Sexuality:theories and politics of anthropology, Alexandriapublications, p. 12

queer has in the English speaking world. In his interpretation of queer and while trying to explain the burden of ostracism the word carries, Yannakopoulos uses the greek word aderfi so that the greek speaking readers can simulate the content of the word. The word aderfi equals the word faggot and is a derogatory word that has been appropriated by gay men, or is in a process of appropriation. Yannakopoulos choice to keep the word queer in latin characters describes a border, a border between the history and tradition of different political cultures as produced by communities using different languages. Queer in latin characters has a meaning or a usage that shapes around a political culture produced in the English speaking world.

In both cases, activist and academic, queer first appeared in latin characters. Since then queer blended in greek language, became a word used within the lgbt and anarchist movement and also used in academic field works of anthropologists and sociologists. It found its greek characters spellings ( or ). But most importantly and interestingly it became an abstract noun in the greek language. It is not used as an adjective to give information about an object, such as queer theory, queer politics or queer person. In greek queer is used as abject noun that signifies an ideology. It is used in similar ways that the word anarchy is being used, to describe an ideology but also a community of people committed to it. In its use in the greek language queer is, similar to English, a rather amorphous term and still emergent enough as to be vague and ill defined as Suzanna Danuta Walters argued.4 On the other hand it is always linked to a politics about gender and

Suzanna Danuta Walters , 2005, From Here to Queer: Radical Feminism, Postmodernism, and the Lesbian Menace, Queer Theory : Readers in Cultural Criticism, ed. Iain Morland and

Annabelle Willox, p.6

sexuality as power structures, to a politics that underlines the intersection between different power structures.

Of course the use of the word queer within these communities does not signal its introduction to the formal greek language, for example there are no entries for it in greek dictionaries nor a page in greek Wikipedia. And even among the communities who use the term, there is an open debate. The lgbt community has at various instances raised questions about queer being an academic trend, an imported discourse with no links to the local lgbt history and a word that tranquilizes internalized homophobia, as it was never a hurtful, derogatory word in greek.

Leo Kalobyrnas, a writer and gay activist, in his recent article Queer: Package with no content?5 characteristically states If we choose the English word queer to identify ourselves with is like wearing a mask that hides us (and therefore protects us) from the consequences of the radical uses of the word in english. And he continues, On the contrary, in Greek the use of an english word abolishes every rupture or radicality in the activist level. The debate within the lgbt community is mainly a debate about queer as an English, thus foreign, word, and not about the meanings attached to it by the people who use it in greek. The view according to which introducing or sharing words between languages should be avoided is based on the absurd notion that a native language remains stable continuously throughout the centuries and has a possible signifier corresponding to every conceivable experience. In this nationalist fantasy, you can conceptualize a native language as a detached coherent and complete, closed system that somehow allows the
5

http://www.10percent.gr/periodiko/teyxos33/3056-2012-12-20-09-41-07.html

possibility of an authentic expression. Authenticity is also linked to narrative of the sexual and gendered self. Sexual desire and gender identity are supposedly elements of individual experience that originate from a psychical within and the way to express them should also come from an imaginary (linguistic) within. These narratives, nationalistic and essentialist, back up the argument against the use of the term queer.

Words -- whether we chose them or we are using them following a cultural imperative -- are always constructed within certain power structures, and furthermore, there is always an impossibility in transferring lived experience within the domain of language, just as it is difficult to understand lived experience outside the domain of language. In this critique, we question the born-this-way narrative, in which we presumably come into the world with a defined essential self, and later we find the words to describe this reality. This account of the relation between

language and experience, as physically matching one another, limits the creativity of self-production. Another explanation of this relationcould conceptualizeself asbecoming possible only while facing the limitations of the social world, when embodied experience crashes upon the symbolic order.

The argument that understands queer as a foreign word stripped from the history of appropriation misrecognizes what politics should be claimed as valid lgbt

politics. For this argument, re-appropriating a hurtful word that stigmatized our experience can be the best way to bring emancipatory liberation to our lives. Ironically, such a strategy was also developed in the so called west, so is a foreign strategy. In our political vision we try to explore multiple moments of queer histories that can be meaningful for our present struggles. Re-appropriating a

derogatory term is definitely a way to claim and reclaim space, and to become empowered through re-examining a trauma. But this is not the only way, and this is not the only queer history that we would like to claim as heritage. The histories of secretive communities, gay underground languages, the plurality of non-western gender variant cultures show that queers have survived in all kinds of ways, seeking for representation in the mainstream or not, being aggressive or hiding, being separatist or assimiliationist and we can find meaningful moments within most of those fragments of the queer histories.

Having said that, we dont advocate some kind of absolute liberal ontology where the queer activists free from all socio-historical constraints, can cherry-pick the words they like from an endless variety of words and cultural practices. The whole process is a product of specific power structures. It is not an accident that queer has a specific history that originates in the aglo-saxon world. Only by a constant process of self-questioning and self-reflexivity it is possible to achieve some kind of a meaningful creativity.

Insisting that attention be paid to the politics of language is extremely crucial in the greek context. The national narrative in both its liberal and fascist expression is always constructed around the idea of a stable, through the centuries, essence of greekness. Language is always a central agent in this fantasy of continuity. In this version of modern greek history the identification with the white-washed, eurocentric version of what ancient Greece was, is the only valid identification. Ancient Greece is presented as the cradle of democracy and reason, the natural ancestor of western liberal democracies. Gay activism in Greece has tried to jump on this nationalist wagon and claim its part of antiquity-inspired legitimacy. The Athens

pride for example uses a rainbow version of Parthenon as their logo, and this years parade has as its main slogan Godess Athena was one of us. The same fantasy is played here: we are part of the national body, and that transcends time and space. Ancient Greece is the place where gayness existed in the identitarian formula we understand it today. We dont want to let this brilliant nationalist fantasy of a dazzling democratic antiquity in the hands of the fascist. We demand a part of this illusion for our lgbt bodies. We are also children of gods and philosophers.

Last year, a queer collective attempted to disrupt this process by bringing a banner to the pride parade which read proud to be a nations shame. In this intervention it became clear that the strategies of representation can vary wildly and showcase paradoxes inherit to the modern greek reality: Greekness can be claimed as a fundamental locus of resistance by both neo-nazis and radical left. Belonging to the greek nation which has fixed and trans-historical characteristics is understood as the best way to gain legitimacy for your struggle for both homophobes and lgbt activists. Greece is represented as an a priori European state, a cradle of European values and unEuropean outcast at the same time.

Queer strategies resisting homonationalstic narratives, as we conceptualize them, can be drawn by using our embodied experiences to map the horizon of interculturals, trans-national encounters. We envision the possibility of creating our own linguistic geographies that transcend nationalist narratives.