The script of the three episodes is based on the research of the CovCare team and more specifically on the interviews of Eirini Avramopoulou, Cynthia Malakasis, Natasa Tsakona.
Script: Vasiliki Lazaridou
Script Editor: Eirini Avramopoulou, Cynthia Malakasis, Eleni Papagaroufali, Natasa Tsakona
Director: Vasiliki Lazaridou
Transcript – special episode narration: Mariniki Alevizopoulou
Scientific Supervision: Eirini Avramopoulou, Eleni Papagaroufali
The actors heard:
Maria Gioni, Filia Kanellopoulou, Eirini Margariti, Elena Polygeni
Recording – episode production: Christos Brito, Studio Aux.
Athens, 2022.
Eirini Avramopoulou & Eleni Papagaroufali
December 2022
In this research project, we aim to examine the multiple forms that gender-based violence took during the pandemic. Very quickly, however, we were confronted with a “dense field” of information: from the actions and reports of organisations and the statistics that they publish, to the discussions about gender violence on social networks and in the media, the barrage of “news” about femicides, testimonies of sexual abuse, etc. This dense dissemination of information on gender-based violence in society creates an ‘atmosphere of knowledge’, which sometimes even goes so far as to cause moral panic, while at the same time it seems that we actually know little or not enough about the impact and consequences of this knowledge (see the ‘shock’ caused by this news, consider who reads the reports of organisations, or what impact it has at the political level, etc.). After all, it is no coincidence that while state actors during the pandemic were ‘rewarding’ the resilience of a population that was bending in the face of security measures and securitisation, at the same time it was gender-based violence itself that remained and continues to remain more resilient than ever (see Avramopoulou 2022).
So we asked ourselves what it is that we would like to know about gender-based violence, but more importantly, what this knowledge does. Or as critical theory, gender studies, and queer theory theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick aptly puts it, “What does knowledge do-the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows?” (2003: 124, cited in Avramopoulou 2018: 38).
These questions are also at the heart of critical public anthropology, when it invites us to imagine or re-imagine the ‘public’, following the critique of the distinction between public and private space, of the normative entrenchments of identity politics and of the ‘easy’ victim/perpetrator identifications that feminist and queer studies have emblematically analysed. We wonder, therefore, about what can be made ‘public’ and what cannot? And how can we (re)know the ‘public’ of public anthropology when this sphere has turned into an ‘atmosphere’ of mourning for many people? Moreover, we ask: how do some of our experiences become public but at the same time turn to be even more private? Last but not least, how does our relationship to the public space change through them and how would all these matter in terms of igniting public action and political mobilization?
We placed the image of an ear in our logo, wanting to indicate that we are concerned not only with making the experiences of gender-based violence, the wishes, dreams and aspirations of survivors of violence “heard” in public, but also with the “how”, i.e. in what ways they can be heard -a question that is directly related to “questions of how we listen and how we intervene in the established boundaries of what can be heard”, as Athena Athanasiou aptly analyses (2016: 156).
We have felt that, in addition to our public talks in on/off university venues, one such way is the production of the four audio “episodes”, which will be available to the general public through our website (https://covcare.gr). We hope that this representational medium will not reproduce stereotypes of victimization, and therefore will not re-traumatize the subjects involved. This is because, while it is based on narratives invented by the subjects involved during our interviews, it reinvented them through their fictional dramatization: It disconnects them, that is, from those subjects, who in stereotypical public discourses are presented as ‘cases’ supposedly separate or special from the rest of the citizens, and meta-narrates them, ‘transposing’ them in a new context, in the dramatized ordinary structural violence that we all undergo. In other words, we align ourselves with the position of those anthropologists who argue that when we intervene publicly on cutting-edge issues such as gender violence, we must be very careful not to (re-)present the individuals who suffer it as the ‘problem’ of society (when the opposite is true).
We assume that this reflective management of the ethnographic material and its staged reinterpretation in this acoustic context of presentation will first of all highlight to some extent how we ourselves listened to our interlocutors. After all, the process of ‘interviewing’ itself, beyond being a process of searching for data or information, remains primarily a ‘somatic communication of the interlocutors and many others’ or a multi-sensory and emotional ‘gesture’ of our engagement with the world (Papagaroufali 2002). More simply, each personal story/experience is a moment of condensation of many different things and persons, as well as the repeated interpretation of these and other roles we embody on a daily basis. It is also hoped that this sound medium will bring to the fore ‘affectscapes of care’, that is, ‘spaces’ and ‘atmospheres’ where lived and experienced gendered violence intertwines with the politics and the affective economy of care (institutional and otherwise) and therefore will, to some extent again, show how, more generally with our research, we want to productively intervene in the established boundaries of what is possible to be heard.
Ultimately, the “echo” we want to have is confronted with the urgency of the present condition to re-test ourselves through difficult concepts and in a field that constantly challenges us to create cracks in what we already know, rather than to fall back on the objectivity and “authority” of knowledge. And all this takes a lot of labour and sweating through difficult theoretical concepts, as Sarah Ahmed (2018) has astutely pointed out. After all, critical storytelling, as we might eventually call the production of sound fiction documentaries, following Saidiya Hartman (2008), is more about the construction of a future archive (from the present critical juncture) that is both possible, as well as impossible or unthinkable to produce because of the historicity of the violence that accompanies it.
Cited Bibliography (Greek):
Avramopoulou, Eirini. 2018. “Introduction. The Political Registers of Affect”, in Avramopoulou, Eirini (ed.), Affect in the Political: Subjectivities, Power, Inequalities in the Modern World, 9-66. Athens: Nisos.
Athanasiou, Athena. 2016. “A post-colonial critique of gender studies: Intervening to that which is possible to be heard.” In Athena Athanasiou, Mina Karavanta, Ioanna Laliotou, and Pinelopi Papailia (eds.). Deconstructing Empire: Theory and Politics of Post-Colonial Critique, pp. 129-161.Athens: Nisos.
Ahmed, Sarah. 2018. “Changing hands: Some thoughts on Ann Oakley’s Sex, gender and society.” Ourania Tsiakalou (Ouranos Tsiakalos) (transl.). Feministiqá 1.
Papagaroufali, Eleni. 2002. “The interview as somatic communication between interlocutors and many others.” Review of Social Research 107(A): 29-46.
Hartman, Saidiya. 2020 [2008]. Venus in Two Acts. Alexis Ioannidis and Giorgos Prodromou (transl.). Athens: Topovoros.
Cited bibliography (English):
Avramopoulou, Eirini. 2022. “Four reasons why care fails and gender – based violence remains resilient in a ‘crisis’ context”. European Feminist Platform. Διαθέσιμο στο https://eu.boell.org/en/2022/01/25/four-reasons-why-care-fails-and-gender-based-violence-remains-resilient-crisis-context
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity. Duke University Press, Durham & London.