Description
The paper explores sites of everyday gendered violence and feminist resistance in Southern Europe, considering how the politics of permanent austerity since 2010 in the region (re)produce and exacerbate this violence. It draws on Feminist International Political Economy (FIPE) and Feminist Security Studies (FSS), in order to expose the responsibility of austerian states and institutions as agents of violence when they put pressure on sites of everyday violence and exacerbate gendered insecurities through processes of dispossession, devaluation and discipline. The paper builds a bottom-up analysis, looking at specific sites of everyday gendered violence, such as the household, workplace, street, borders and political platforms, and exploring how they correlate with austerity policies and discourses. It also seeks to visualise the alternatives posed in sites of feminist resistance that confront the violence of austerity, mapping ideas and practices of resistance to counter gender violence in Southern Europe, including local and transnational organizing, community responses or less visible acts of resistance in complex sites of violence. Feminist activists and scholars have documented and performed different forms of resistance, in order to confront oppression, but also to render visible and politicise silenced and hidden violences. Feminist praxis and knowledge on resistance, thus, puts forward possibilities to confront an extremely violent global political economy.
