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surface/occupy central ground while others are hidden or deemed peripheral and perhaps “luxury” concerns. Among these, questions of spatial scale or the diverging and unequal ways in which the crisis is lived in different regions and in particular places and most prominently cities, “where austerity bites, [h]owever, never equally” (Peck, 2012: 629). It is even more difficult to bring forward the “scale closest in”, i.e the concrete bodies that suffer/resist the policies of austerity, or to debate openly the growing appeal of ever more conservative attitudes which weave together xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, racism, antisemitism, islamophobia, class politics (see also Athanasiou, 2012). Analyses which stress the gendered facets of the crisis and its unequal effects on women and men are rare and do not permeate the allegedly “central” or dominant understandings (among the few are Karamessini, 2013; Avdela, Psarra, 2012). It seems that the issue is taboo, even among left-wing analysts; it is thought to pertain to a “special”, i.e. less important, matter which may detract from the “main problem”3.
Missing from the picture This short contribution is part of work that has grown out of my interest in the less debated aspects of the Greek crisis. Through a series of examples and taking the risk of “strategic essentialism”, I discuss some of the ways in which the current crisis, that is also or primarily urban, as Harvey (2012) argues, hits women as embodied subjects. I start from the premise that, behind statistics and macro-economic calculations, different women (and men) live with unemployment, precarity, salary and pension cuts, poverty and deprivation or shrinking social rights and mounting everyday violence in the crisis-ridden neighbourhoods of Athens. The stories (or “snapshots”) of ordinary women that I evoke here are drawn from research in different neighbourhoods of Athens (see for example Vaiou, 2013, 2014, Vaiou & Kalandides, 2013). These stories of significant changes in women’s everyday lives help to reflect on how concrete experiences fit in/diverge from general patterns and common understandings of “the” crisis when the spaces of everyday life become test beds for coping/ resisting austerity and authoritarianism. “Suspended” bodies A significant part of austerity policies has to do with downsizing the state, which practically means the dismissal of thousands of public sector employees. Among them, 595 cleaners of the Ministry of Finance and 1700 administrative employees of universities. Administrators have fought a bitter and inventive ATHENS AND BEYOND
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