Description
Book SynopsisAn ethnographic study that shows how similar national and cultural beliefs about gender, sexuality, and Greekness are the basis of both the public condemnation of abortion and its prevalence in Greece.
Trade Review“Alexandra Halkias probes the tension between the male-centered, hegemonic assumptions of European nationalism and the representation of the nation as a female body (and the female body as a national property) with an adroit irony leavened by perceptive compassion. At the heart of the paradox of modern Greece, cast as both the despised backwater and the glorious cradle of ‘the West,’ she incisively dissects a concomitant paradox: insistent calls to fill the cradle coexist with a remarkably high rate of abortion. This is politically forthright cultural analysis grounded in intimate and yet also wide-ranging observation.”—Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University
“The question of Greek women’s ready use of abortion and their ‘failure’ to use other methods of birth control is one that for some time has intrigued anthropologists. Alexandra Halkias offers provocative arguments regarding the ‘naturalness’ of abortion and the relationship between sexuality and national identity.”—Jill Dubisch, author of
In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island ShrineTable of ContentsAcknowledgents xi
Introduction 1
Part 1. The Agoras of Agon
1. Setting the Stage: Athens, Greece, Fantasy, and History 19
2. Stage Left: Greek Women 35
3. Center Stage: What is Greece? 53
4. Stage Right: The Demografiko 77
Part 2. In Context, in Contests
5. In the Operating Room: On Cows, Greece, and the Smoking Fetus 89
6. Give Birth for Greece! Abortion and Nation in the Greek Press 113
Part 3. Sexing the Nation
7. Navigating the Night 135
8. The Impossible Dream: The Couple as Mother 207
9. Abortion, Pain, and Agency 235
10. Reprosexuality and the Modern Citizen Face the Specter of Turkey 291
11. A Critical Cartography of the Demografiko’s Greece 319
Epilogue: Theory and Policy 345
Notes 349
References 381
