Everyday Invisibility

In the wake of Greece's 2008 economic collapse, African women in Athens navigated intensified discrimination shaped by the intersecting forces of gender, race and migration status. This feminist ethnography investigates how processes of racialization intersect with gender and migration status to produce complex forms of disadvantage. This book argues that gendered racialization renders these women not only invisible but also hyper-visible in stereotypical ways that heighten their exposure to discrimination and precarity. Through everyday survival tactics, home-making practices and collective mobilization, these women resist exclusion and marginalization. Acting individually and collectively, they work to improve material conditions and gain social intelligibility, ultimately challenging normative boundaries of belonging in contemporary Greece.

Viki Zaphiriou-Zarifi has over 15 years of experience in gender, migration and development across South Asia, Africa and Europe. She was a runner up for the Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights at the University of Texas.