From Anti Austerity Protests to Gender-Based Mobilizations: Identifying Continuities and Ruptures in Social Movements in Greece during Crisis

The feminist movement in Greece hasn’t always been a front-page issue; quite the opposite. However, since the rise of the #MeToo movement in 2017 and the sexual abuse allegations by an Olympic athlete in 2020, things changed radically. Artists, journalists, and athletes now speak about sexual misconduct; mainstream media report cases of femicide and rape; feminist collectives have multiplied; and demonstrations protest state policies on women’s rights and systemic patriarchy in the judiciary and everyday life. In just a few years, gender-based mobilizations emerged at the forefront of collective activism in the country.

This paper attempts to unravel continuities and ruptures in social movements in Greece over the last decade, situating the rise of gender-based mobilizations within a broader context. First, drawing on previous research on Greek social movements during the protracted poly-crisis of the last fifteen years, we explore the reorientation away from traditional forms of protest politics into solidarity movements that foreground care and vulnerability. During the economic, refugee, and pandemic crises, this transformation in resisting austerity and injustice challenged traditional divisions of labor within movements and dominant modes of masculine militant organizing. Second, based on secondary sources and qualitative field research with movement initiatives in Crete, we aim to re-read movement activities through a gender-based lens while considering their interconnectedness with regional feminist movements. This helps us investigate the roles of reproductive politics, affect, and intersectionality in how broader social movements evolved during crisis and their impact on the discourses and practices of gender-based mobilizations. Ultimately, we seek to illuminate the unique trajectories and transformations of gender-based mobilizations in the Mediterranean during this period, highlighting how community struggles, local territories, and lived spaces in the region inform peripheral feminisms that challenge hegemonic understandings of resistance and contribute to the decolonization of feminism.