For an installation, first presented during the Queer Archive Festival 2021, seeking to raise the issue of the visibility of gender identities linked to femininity and basically set aside by the public sphere, I created 48 postcards, combining well-known tourist landscapes of Athens with images of lesbian couples in altered visualization. On the back of each postcard, one can find excerpts of women's stories from archive research in Greek lesbian and feminist magazines.
Having tourist shops as my starting point, I chose the medium of postcards as an intimate object of everyday life, which one will readily observe, perhaps overtake, transfer and give by spreading in this way, voluntarily or unintentionally, the information it bears. Therefore, I aimed indirectly to exploit the visitors as potential disseminators of information within and beyond the city of Athens. My involvement with these archives served as a means of promoting the lesbian communities of Greece and feminist speech, but also as a reminder of the value of protection, systematic recording and publicity of their action.
"The political is personal" is the slogan that, in the 1980s, expressed the demands for the emergence of the private sphere. Rich archival and non-archival material revealed that women were never absent from historical events. Still, their presence was silenced because of their frequent connection to the private, not the public, space (Avdela E., Psarra A., 1997). According to Arendt, the public space is the area of politics, according to ancient Athens (polis) standards. Therefore, public space exists "only where men act together and cooperate" (Vaiou N., Kalantidis A., 2009).
Similarly, Bahrdt argues that "the strict distinction between the private and the public is central to understanding the urban" (Vaiou N., Kalantidis A., 2009). According to him, it is this polarization that forms a city and defines what belongs to it, raising other dipoles and classifications around those who "deserve" to be in the public space and the "outsiders" (Vaiou N., Kalantidis A., 2009). "Thus, public space is, as it is often said, dominated by men, local, white, urban, heterosexual, adult - subjects who can act and move freely there, expelling "others", as they are defined every time according to various criteria (gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, age), and/or combinations thereof." (Vaiou N., Kalantidis A., 2009) It becomes clear that the public sphere is inextricably linked to the concept of masculinity as a socially constructed model, created within the patriarchy, but also feedback it (Connell 1993). The idea of masculinity is not fixed and invariant in space and time, nor unique. Its multiple forms are structured according to the historical, cultural and social context. Even the eventual stabilization of these parameters could not lead to absolute universal standards of masculinity for the groups concerned (Kimmel 1994). In this context, hegemonic masculinity, which perpetuates patriarchy and ostracizes women from public space, can arise even in LGBTQ movements.
Using the example of San Francisco in the 1970s, the "gay capital of the world", where "sex and lawlessness were found in various aspects of public life" (Aldrich R., 2004), one can easily see that male homosexuals led the gay rights claim movements. "The dynamic and radical claim of homosexuals for the political recognition of their existence and visibility led to the occupation of parts of the urban space and established a spatial practice that moved against one of the basic dichotomies of the capitalist system, male/female and their nuclear complementarity, family" (Urban Conflicts",2015).
Thus, gay men could gain visibility in the public realm and the possibility of gradually integrating into the political and social life of the city. At the same time, gay women in San Francisco are not gaining such strong visibility in the town, as Castells states: "Gay men need a real space to run their freedom problems, while lesbians do not need physical space and tend to create their own rich, inner world" (Adler S., Brenner J., 1992). Furthermore, women consistently experience multiple restrictions on their activity in the public realm. As Holcomb states: "Perhaps the gender differences in terms of their access to capital are those that did not allow the lesbian network of relationships and homes to be followed by lesbian businesses and properties". Moreover, Valentine argues that "the fear of women from male violence is connected to the way that public space is used, occupied and controlled by different groups at different times". (Adler S., Brenner J., 1992) Thus, It is concluded that women were not absent from rights claims movements or the city's life in general, but were kept in the background because of the restrictions emanating from patriarchy.
