Sexuality, class and space in the Athenian lesbian and queer feminist activist scene

This article examines the intersections of class and sexuality within the Athenian lesbian and queer scene, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2015 with lesbian feminist groups and queer collectives. Situating the research within the upheavals of the Greek economic crisis, I argue that lesbian and queer spaces are not merely sites of sexual and political community-making but are deeply classed formations. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of classed habitus and Binnie’s work on queer cosmopolitanism, I trace how class shapes practices of belonging and exclusion across three spatial formations: lesbian bars, lesbian feminist activist spaces and self-organized queer spaces. Middle-class and politicized lesvies disidentify from the working-class culture of kapsoura and kamaki associated with lesbian bars, constructing lesbian feminist identity through narratives of respectability and Europeanized modernity. Queer spaces, shaped by theoretical fluency and cosmopolitan mobility, similarly function as sites of cultural authority that working-class participants experience as exclusionary. I argue that the class divisions within Athenian lesbian and queer politics reveal how the aspiration towards western queer exceptionalism shapes the possibilities and limits of queer world-making in contemporary Greece.