QUEER BODIES PERFORMING ATHENS

This project addresses queer bodies that live and navigate the public space of Athens through methods of collective creation, embodied approaches, and queer performance. My focus lays on the ways in which the public spaces of Athens affect queer performance and vice versa, as well as in the ways in which queer performance can consciously disrupt the city’s hegemony. Queer performance is here defined as the performance (behaviour) of the self-identified queer bodies which can be non-patriarchal, non cisnormative, non-heteronormative; bodies that represent “an open mesh of possibilities, overlaps, dissonances, lapses, and excesses of meaning” (Sedwig, 1994). Through my work in the project Queer Bodies Performing Athens, I invited queer bodies and facilitated actions in collaboration with them as well as created my own queer disruptions in the city. As a result of this research, I have gathered insight into the embodied effects of a hostile public space onto the queer body, and have developed tactics for “responding” to the hostility through performative actions in an effort to disrupt cisnormativity.