Ecofeminism and the Cultural Affinity to Genocidal Capitalism: Theorising Necropolitical Femicide in Contemporary Greece

Abstract

Resilient necrocapitalism and the zombie genre of representations of current dystopias are persistent in their political purpose in producing changes in the social order to benefit plutocracies around the world. It is through a thanatopolitical lens that we should view the successive losses of life, and this zombie genre has come to represent a dystopia that, for political purposes, is intended to produce changes in societies which have tolerated the violent deaths of women. This article focuses on contemporary Greece and proposes a theoretical framework where femicide is understood as a social phenomenon that reflects a global gendered necropolitical logic which equals genocide. Such theoretical assemblages have to be situated within intersectional imperatives and tacitly as the result of the capitalist terror state performed in an expansive and direct immediate death, exacerbated by the lingering slow social death of the welfare state. The article contends that the scripted hetero-patriarchal social order of the necrocapitalist state poses a unique political threat to societies. With the silence of the complicity of the state, what is necessary is the creation and spread of new political knowledge and new social movements as resilient political tactics of resistance. This article foregrounds an ecofeminist perspective on these issues and considers ways through which new pedagogies of hope can counter the gendered necropolitics of contemporary capitalism in Greece.

Keywords

• Greece
• ecofeminism
• gendered violence
• feminicide
• femicidality
• patriarchal biopolitics