For the Love of Women

Gender, Identity and Same-Sex Relations in a Greek Provincial Town

Elisabeth Kirtsoglou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134388813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This extraordinary book opens up the strange world of the 'parea' - a lesbian secret society based in a small-town bar outside Athens, whose members meet clandestinely to drink, dance and flirt. Though conducting intense sexual affairs under the noses of other customers, the parea's members - many of whom are married with children and have perfectly conventional lives by Greek standards - do not identify themselves as gay and have very negative images of homosexuality. Based entirely on fieldwork within the parea, For The Love of Women weaves stories of women's lives and relationships into an intriguing and perceptive analysis

1

For the Love of Women

I saw her suddenly: and I thought ‘God, she is so beautiful’. I remember her in the dim light, warm and radiant and graceful, so alive. I was lost, abandoned in the sparkle of her eyes, gone. It was only a moment: a moment that lasted for so long. I wanted to embrace her, to close her in my arms tightly, in a desperate attempt to freeze time, to snatch the moment.

(Zoi, Kallipolis 1997)

Documentations

This book is an ethnographic exploration of the social and performative realisation of gender identity as this is discursively and practically negotiated by a group of gay women in a Greek provincial town, which I call Kallipolis. Although the protagonists of this study engage in same-sex erotic relationships, they do not regard themselves as lesbians. Instead, they seek to promote a particular approach to gender and sexuality, according to which gender is a socially constructed category and sexual practices are not constitutive of identity. The members of this all female company maintain that they are a group, an affective community of friends bound by emotional ties who pursue erotic relationships with women, yet they wish to remain – in terms of their identity – unclassifiable.¹ Respecting their wish to resist common categories of self-ascription, I refer to these women throughout the book, as ‘the parea’ (the company), appropriating the expression they use to refer to themselves.²

My ethnographic textualisation of the life of the parea focuses on how its members employ certain culturally informed practices, such as dance and alcohol consumption, in order to articulate specific gender ideas and relations not only discursively, but also through aesthetically compelling public performances. The women of the parea reveal nothing about their sexual and ideological preoccupations to the other inhabitants of Kallipolis and present themselves as a ‘company of friends’. None the less, the parea’s gendered performances take place at a highly visible space, a night-spot with live Greek music, frequented by virtually every adult in the town. The conscious decision of these women to engage in a constant politic of ‘concealment and display’ (cf. Herzfeld, 1987) by performatively locating themselves in this popular nightspot while fiercely protecting the opacity of their sexual lives, signals their ambition to remain fully integrated members of the social context within which they exist.

At the same time, the parea develops its own distinct group culture that entails public performances which take place within the framework of ritualised practices founded by the women of the group. The life of the company revolves around invented rituals based on conspicuous consumption of alcohol, food commensality and dance, that serve to mark specific events, such as the establishment or the end of an erotic relationship, and the initiation of a new member into the parea. Every such occasion is for the group a discursive and performative field for identity-making, in the framework of which the women draw upon familiar cultural material in order to compose an idiosyncratic idiom of personhood (cf. Sax, 2002: 4–5). In this sense, this work is concerned with an alternative context of gender (cf. Loizos and Papataxiarchis, 1991a: 4)³ that is, however, firmly established within a specific cultural region.

My ethnographic involvement with this community of women does not attempt to present a social or historical account of lesbianism in Greece. The aim of this study is to demonstrate how a specific group of women with their particular sexuality negotiate their identity vis-à-vis the notions of gender prevalent in the society and culture that surrounds them. Kallipolis – my field site – and my informants alike are neither fully representative nor completely atypical examples of female homosexuality in Greece.⁴ In this respect my book is as much about differences within (Greek, gay) women (cf. Moore, 1993; McNay, 2000: 1–2; Braidotti, 2002: 14) as it is about the shared experience of being a (gay) woman in a Greek province.

The unique narrative of my informants, which is nevertheless tied to larger categories of cultural, gender and class identity, is depicted in five ethnographic chapters which follow the life of the parea in its performative and discursive instances. The remaining part of this introduction is devoted to the explication of the cultural connotations of some of the parea’s practices, concluding with a note on methodology. In Chapter Two I present a theoretical overview that aims to situate my analysis in the corpus of regional and more general gender theory placing special emphasis on sexuality, the embodied dimension of subjectivity, and the relation between identity, performance and agency.

Chapter Three, the first of the ethnographic chapters, focuses on the ritualistic initiation of new members into the group. Incorporating new women into the parea is based on erotic attraction and usually follows a specific pattern that aims to ensure the establishment of an erotic relationship between a woman of the community and an outsider, as well as the successful integration of the new partner into the company. In this sense every initiation is simultaneously a courtship based on what Herzfeld calls ‘effective performance’, that is, a performance that ‘uses form to draw attention to a set of messages’ (1985: 47). Through alcohol, dance and food commensality, as well as through flirtation and the symbol of the ‘effeminate’ body, the women of the group enact an alternative gender model and assert the existence and growth of their collectivity.

Probably the most distinct set of practices in the parea is that pertinent to the different model of relatedness the women promote. Chapter Four concentrates on the two main forms of relatedness that exist within the parea, namely, friendship and erotic relationships. Friendship is regarded by my informants as the primal expression of emotional bonding. All the women have a ‘best friend’ who performs some of the roles usually encountered in familial relationships. Along with these friendships, one can safely argue that the group promotes a form of kinship based on personal choice and being entirely complementary to the ‘erotic’ self (cf. Weston, 1991/1997: 103–22). Through these friendships, the women construct strong emotional ties and employ their community both as a female network and as a framework for the creative redefinition of notions of kinship and identity.

The second part of Chapter Four is dedicated to erotic relationships. Erotic unions and flirting strategies are the two themes that consume most of my informants’ time. Sexual expression in the group revolves around the idea of pleasure accomplished in passionate but nevertheless ephemeral unions. Their ideal relationship closely approximates Giddens’ concept of the ‘pure relationship’ (1992) since it lasts as long as it satisfies both partners. In turn, the members of the parea measure satisfaction against the existence of passion and excitement. They do not wish to see their relationships transformed into loving and caring partnerships and thus once erotic passion ceases to exist a relationship is concluded. Since erotic behaviour in the context of the group depends on non-verbal as well as verbal communication, this section also examines dance and consumption as ‘sites of social action’ (cf. Cowan, 1990: 5).

Chapter Five is concerned with separation. The conclusion of an erotic relationship is treated by the parea as a highly ritualised occasion of collective regenerative mourning. In this chapter, I draw a parallel between the mourning practices of the group and those of a conventional Greek funeral. Without suggesting that the contexts of death and separation are identical, I am concerned with pain as a context for the construction of gender identity through the politics of suffering (cf. Seremetakis, 1991; Dubisch, 1995). One of my main concerns in this chapter is the use of narrative as a means of selfrealisation (McNay, 2000: 27–9, 81–5; Braidotti, 2002: 22). Through long narrations that take place as part of the separation process, the women I studied rewrite their own personal history and that of the group and actively construct and disseminate ideas about gender and gender relations.

The women of the parea are, however, not only members of the group but also of a greater cultural community. Chapter Six documents their narratives as cultural persons who sustain and negotiate relationships with significant others, who do not belong to the parea. This chapter offers a series of portraits of women who struggle to remain part of ‘both worlds’, that of mainstream Kallipolis and the parea, arguing for the multiple and contextual character of identity (Corber and Valocchi, 2003: 2–3). The main purpose of this chapter is to illuminate the cultural conditions under which the women of the group resist as well as accommodate ‘ideals and expectations defined for them’ (cf. Goddard, 1996: 239). Through these narrative portraits, I wish to show instances of the dialectic relationship that exists between the parea and its social context by presenting my informants not only as women of the group but also as mothers, daughters and persons who hold multiple and at times conflicting identifications (cf. Moore, 1994).

Finally, the last ethnographic chapter explores the origins of the parea, a friendship group established initially by four women during their university years in Athens. Their stories, together with other narratives of women who do not strictly belong to the parea, reveal the episodic and biographical quality of gender identity, one that is socially constructed and often composed through random encounters of the actor with powerful societal idioms. In this chapter, I focus upon the institutionalised character of heterosexuality and I treat sexuality as ‘a specifically dense transfer point for relations of power’ (Foucault, 1976: 103), examining the relationship between gender and wider idioms pertinent to self-realisation.

Throughout this work, I treat gender as an identity that is socially constructed, ‘tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through stylized repetitions of acts (Butler, 1990: 140, original emphasis). I claim that consciously or unconsciously, enacted gender performances serve to question as much as to crystallise conventional ideas and I pay specific attention to the role of the body as the material locus of subjectivity. I conclude the book by arguing that my informants’ performances pertain to a culturally informed poetics of personhood according to which the self is always established competitively and in a defiant manner vis-à-vis some hegemonic discourse that threatens the actor’s creativity, and places him/her in a paradoxical position of being at once powerful and powerless. The women protagonists of this work articulate sophisticated narratives of resistance (cf. McNay, 1992: 39; Alsop et al., 2002: 83–4) from the margins of the Greek periphery. These narratives try to negotiate the lived contradictions of my informants’ daily lives into a meaningful statement about the self, and the experience of being first and foremost a woman who happens to have a homoerotic sexuality in a largely heterocentric Greek provincial town.

Introducing the Parea

Parea is a colloquial Greek term that stands for ‘company’. An extremely versatile word, according to its contextual usage, it can mean anything from ‘to keep company’ (kano parea), a company of men and women, or a specifically male group. When married couples enjoy a night out together for instance they use the word parea (company) to refer to all those who share a table at a night-spot (Cowan, 1990: 155, 158). The term is also employed by people near Athens to suggest ‘a group of male friends who regularly drink together’ (Madianou-Gefou, 1992: 117) while, in the Aegean island of Lesbos, all male friendship groups that enjoy eating and drinking commensality are referred to as parea (Loizos and Papataxiarchis, 1991a: 17; Papataxiarchis, 1991: 166; 1992: 215–16). As a general definition, one could say that parea stands for a group of people (sometimes specifically male) who come together voluntarily (cf. Cowan, 1990: 159), usually in order to enjoy themselves through drinking, eating or dancing but also in other contexts. A parea can be stable through time and exist beyond the spatio-temporal bounds of commensality or not, while in most cases it is (or it pretends to be) an egalitarian schema.⁵

The women I studied refer to their group as ‘the parea’, or ‘the girls’,⁶ and maintain that their company is an ‘affective community’ (synaisthimatiki koinotita) bound by strong emotional ties. The main corpus of the group is situated in a provincial town that I call Kallipolis, a town of approximately 200,000 inhabitants, large enough to have a university, a hospital, numerous schools, and an active trading centre. The women of the parea live and work in this community as fully integrated members, some of them married with children. They study or have their own businesses, work in the public sector or free-lance, and generally they are indistinguishable from the rest of the Kallipoliots. The parea is an egalitarian community with no specific leader or any system of patronage, and consists of approximately seventy women of mixed socio-economic, educational and age status.⁷ The number of women affiliated to the group, however, is a much larger one since everybody who happened to be a member at some point in time is always considered a member irrespectively of whether she is physically present. Thus during the years that I was close to the community, women of different ages who lived in other towns kept returning to Kallipolis in order to spend some time with the parea, and were treated as if they never left.

The parea consists of persons who approximate the image of the ‘middle-class-urban-educated woman’, who – if unmarried – is able to pursue erotic relationships in a relatively free manner, dresses fashionably, and frequents – usually in the company of others – bars, cafes and restaurants (cf. Faubion, 1993: 174–6). The women of the community, and the majority of Kallipoliot women in general, are in this sense similar to their Athenian counterparts described by Faubion (1993). They are educated, very much ‘modernised’ and frequently economically independent but, nevertheless, still expected to be ‘proficient housewives’ (ibid.: 176). Most of my informants’ female friends and relatives who are single and do not belong to the parea, are in search of ‘serious’ (sovares)erotic relationships that will hopefully end in marriage. Soon after a wedding reception of the standard type (cf. Argyrou, 1996), they will have to learn the art of balancing their lives between work outside the home and their domestic duties before they eventually have sons and daughters of their own. Some of the women of the group will also eventually marry. Some others, however, choose to disregard the increasing social pressure to ‘open a house [i.e. create a home] of their own’ (cf. Hirschon, 1989: 108; Cowan, 1992: 141–2) and prefer the friendship network of the parea to heterosexual conjugality.

Married or single, those who belong to the group, try and meet at night in a specific night-spot that I call Harama, and on other occasions for coffee, dinner, lunch and so forth.⁸ At any moment of the day some women of the parea are gathered at some place, be it in a tavern or a home or even the private business of one of them, and one can spend time with friends literally on a 24-hour basis. The women of the group do not simply spend time together though, they also help each other in any way they can. The ‘girls’ know precisely each other’s problems and they are heavily involved in each other’s lives functioning as a large extended family (cf. Weston, 1991) that supports all its members emotionally, socially and even financially.

Most of these women’s shared time is devoted to pleasurable talk, commensality and serious discussions. Some of them read a great deal, academic books and literature, and they usually transmit this knowledge to their friends. Thus, being a member of the parea means, among other things, discussing Foucault, contemporary art, cinema and international politics. A basic consequence of their general lifestyle is that to the eyes of the Kallipoliots, the women I studied are not outcasts⁹ but instead are perceived as a circle of rather intellectual friends. The parea is in many ways, a network that enables the women to live a non-ordinary life, which is itself enabled by the alternative lifestyle of its members (cf. A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. For the love of women
• 2. Theoretical reflections
• 3. Flirting with the ‘other’: ritualistic incorporation in the realm of the parea
• 4. Relationships
• 5. Separation
• 6. Contextual identities
• 7. Different people, same places – different places, same people
• 8. The long zeimbekiko
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index