Thesis Title:
The entanglement of violence and gender in the Greek Resistance and Civil War
Thesis Abstract:
Violence during the Greek Resistance and Civil War has been primarily analysed as a political phenomenon, restricting analysis and intervention to incomplete conceptions of its meaning, function and dynamics. By reintegrating political analysis into socio-cultural conceptions of violence, this project draws from multiple disciplinary lenses to expand the analytical lens through which we view violence and its role as an embodied practice as well as a discursive phenomenon laden with social, cultural, and personal meaning. This research examines the co-constructive relationship between violence and gender during a period of irregular violent conflict, seeking to deepen our disciplinary treatments of violence, our understanding of how gendered discourses and structures influence violence, and the broader interrelation of political, social and cultural phenomena in Greece and beyond.
To this aim, this research develops the concept of a historicised ‘landscape’ of interacting and dynamic systems that co-construct gender and violence across multiple levels. Mobilising archival, personal, literary and material evidence, the project employs hermeneutical discourse analysis and thick description to ‘read’ instances, interpretations, and representations of violence for meaning, and for their interaction with these systems.
This model may be valuably applied to contemporary contexts, producing insight into discrete forms of violence, the interaction of violence with various analytical categories, or the unique expression of violence in different socio-historical or geopolitical contexts. It will therefore contribute to scholarship on the relationship between conflict and violence and violence as an endemic and historicised aspect of societal organisation. These insights may be valuably transferred to policy interventions on gender, violence, and conflict and establish new pathways for integrating historical and socio-cultural analysis with the political and social sciences.
Primary Supervisor:
Dr David Brydan