The Psyche and the Body: Political Persecution and Gender Violence against Women in the Greek Civil War

Within the context of the Greek Civil War and the years immediately following the civil strife, the political persecution and harassment of women was distinct, as were the gendered characteristics of their repression. Because the gendered dynamics of the victimization of the female dissidents were both a form of political control as well as a source of nationalist ideology, the political exclusion and coercion of women was not merely aimed at suppressing the Left, but was also a vital part of a wider state-operated and nationalist project of appropriated "Greekness." Moreover, the repression of women partisans and activists, as imposed by the state and articulated by the national rhetoric, was acting in interdependence with a highly patriarchal order. Through the designated gender roles and the derogated status of partisans and activists as the immoral enemy, women were transformed into the ethnic and political "other" within the imagined Greek Nation.