A Gendered
Analysis of Youth Identity Negotiations in Post-2009 Greece
by Erin Worden
March 2016
I was 9 when the
2004 Olympic Games in Athens aired on my gray tube television. Watching from my
quiet home in suburban Pennsylvania, I remember seeing the iconic interlocking
circles of the Olympic rings illuminated with fire. I remember the blue event
banners fading into the similarly colored sky. And, even more than that, I
remember an image of Greece that seemed to be basking in its own stability,
celebrating its new membership to the Eurozone, and heading toward what
promised to be a thriving future.
I was 14 when
Alexandros Grigoropoulos was killed and the debt crisis began unraveling the
stability -- whether it was real or imagined -- that I saw on my television
just a few years earlier. On the news, I saw lines of hooded young people collectively push back against police in resistance.
I remember seeing protests signs move to the beat of the chants shouted by
young people as they marched through Athens. These young Greeks seemed far more
engaged, invested, and active than youth in my own country, where open
encounters with politics felt distant and removed in comparison.
These young
people -- who, in many ways, feel like peers in my own generation -- have been
dubbed Greece’s “Lost Generation.” Reports stress their disillusionment,
frustration, and unemployment. An endless, somewhat dismal stream of new
stories correlate these generational realities of non-belonging with poverty,
poor health, social exclusion, and damaged self-esteem among other long-term,
ostensibly burdening effects (Asmussen, Europe’s
World). For many of these reasons, an estimated 200,000 Greeks -- many of
whom are young and educated -- have emigrated to pursue opportunities abroad
(Smith, The Guardian).
These realities
exist for countless Greek young people, but this feels different than the
“lived” generation of young people who have stuck around. Several days ago, I
spotted a young Greek man, who sported a neat-looking suit, leave an office
building. He seemed to be around my age. He approached his bike, swapped his
professional-looking shoes for a pair of worn-in sneakers, and attempted to
start the engine before finally succeeding on his fifth try.
This man, who
would likely be described by existing scholarship and reports as “lost,”
embodied resilience. He responded to the bike engine’s hesitation with
persistence and an insistence on himself, which -- based on my few weeks in
central Athens as an outsider -- reflects a broader sense of youth-driven
determination that challenges and perhaps transcends the disillusion of
Greece’s “Lost Generation.”
Students’
backpacks, for example, are decorated with pins advertising advocacy and social
justice movements. The other day, I stumbled into several political organizing
events at the University of Athens’ School of Economics and Political Sciences.
Last week, I drank a cappuccino at a coffee shop in Koukaki run by an edgy,
urban cooperative daring to create solidarity and collective solutions to daily
negotiations of the crisis.
To me, this
generation seems far from “lost.”
Casting off this
generation of young Greeks as hopelessly “lost” does acknowledge the daily
struggles of being young in contemporary Greece, but it also discredits the
ways in which Greek youth actively resist the stunting effects of
disillusionment.
It seems to me
that a fairer, more productive understanding of this generation needs to
harness the energy, activism, and intellect of Greek youth. Instead of
exploring how Greek youth are “lost,” new discourses must focus on how these
young people are coping with their
identities and actively negotiating
what it means to be a young person during this moment in Greece.
In addition to
considering the implications of age, these new modalities of understanding
Greece’s youth must also take gender into account. Gender -- much like
generation -- functions as a conduit through which identities are
(re)constituted and performed. This means that age impacts the identity
negotiations of young Greeks just as much as their experiences with gender.
For example,
limited findings in this relatively under-researched field suggests that Greek
women experience higher rates of unemployment than men with jobless figures
tallying 32 and 27.5 percent, respectively (Velissaris, Neos Kosmos). This trend continues, as research implies that Greek
women are more likely than their male counterparts to leave the workplace or
take up part-time work, largely as a response to surging childcare costs
(Velissaris, Neos Kosmos). Women in
post-2009 Greece, in this sense, face a higher risk of experiencing poverty
than Greek men (Velissaris, Neos Kosmos).
Recent suicide rate trends, additionally, imply that men -- perhaps burdened
with the crisis’ renewed social pressure to be “providers” -- commit suicide at
higher rates that largely follow unemployment models. Importantly, I have come
across no research or reports that focus on the crisis-related identity
negotiations of Greek youth who do not conform to gender binaries, thus
illuminating a field of research to explore further.
Taken as a
whole, this means that unraveling this generation’s many understandings and
expressions of identity, age, and crisis cannot ignore these young people’s
experiences with gender.
Applying this
gender-sensitive understanding to an investigation of Greek youth identity not
only contributes to a more intimate, nuanced discourse regarding this
generation but also imagines Greek young people as social agents who actively
resist being “lost” and instead are “found.”
