The Victimisation of the Body and the Body Politic during the Greek Civil War, 1946–49

Abstract

During the Greek Civil War (1946–49) and the years to follow, thousands of citizens, among them a great number of women, were persecuted, confined and terrorised in a series of incidents of continuous political violence and oppression. This essay argues that throughout this politically and socially turbulent period (1946–74), the phenomenon of political violence against the female dissidents took an explicitly gendered form not only in its implemented practices such as rape and sexual abuse, psychological terror, political imprisonment and exile, but also as a means of re-traditionalising gender roles and power relations as “natural” and “given”. This essay will try to bring forward the downplayed gendered characteristics of sexually related violence, especially rape, during the Greek Civil War (1946–49) and analyse it within the nationalist ideology and the ascribed traditional gender roles through which the mechanisms of terrorisation were institutionalised and legitimised. The research question, based on postgraduate work, is situated within a wider theoretical debate on the interconnectedness between gender, political violence and nationalism. It also brings together interdisciplinary theoretical insights and methodological contributions from politics, history and gender studies through the employment of a series of sources, such as interviews, memoirs and archival material.