'Cyprus Is the Country of Heroes, Not of Homosexuals': Sexuality, Gender

This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ ‘Cyprus is the Country of Heroes, Not of Homosexuals’ Sexuality, Gender and Nationhood in Cyprus Kamenou, Nayia Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 03. Oct. 2021 This electronic theses or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Title: ‘Cyprus is the Country of Heroes, Not of Homosexuals’ Sexuality, Gender and Nationhood in Cyprus Author: Nayia Kamenou The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ You are free to: Share: to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. ‘Cyprus is the Country of Heroes, Not of Homosexuals’: Sexuality, Gender and Nationhood in Cyprus NAYIA KAMENOU KING’S COLLEGE LONDON 2011 Thesis Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in European Studies Nayia Kamenou Page 1 of 343 Acknowledgements My doctorate studies were supported by grants from the Graduate School of King’s College London and from the Cyprus State Scholarship Foundation, for which I am grateful. First and foremost, many sincere and humble thanks to all the people who kindly agreed to be interviewed and generously shared with me their thoughts, ideas, life experiences, fears and expectations. My deepest thanks and gratitude is owed to all those individuals whose names cannot be revealed for various reasons. These are the anonymous, yet individually unique, Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot men and women, who opened their hearts and personal achieves to me. Their long- silenced voices and negated pain reminded me of the importance of socially engaged academic research, at a crucial moment in the development of this project. I am indebted to Alecos Modinos for being an inspirer and living proof that no struggle for justice goes to vain, regardless of its cost. I am also grateful to Achilleas Demetriades for allowing me to use his rich, legal archive and to the employees at the Press Information Office in Cyprus for making me laugh, even while I was buried under piles of newspapers! Many thanks also to the activists Despina Michaelidou, Yoryis Regginos, Hüseyin Çavusoğlu, Stavros Giannakopoulos and Themis Katsagiannis for sharing with me their stories and for providing me with advice and assistance whenever I needed it. This project would not have been possible without the superb networking abilities of Petros Papadopoulos, a dear friend, who greatly assisted me with participant recruitment. My primary supervisor, Professor Jan Palmowski, deserves special thanks for being a tireless, attentive and companionate mentor, whose rich ideas and insightful suggestions kept me on the right track up to the completion of this project. Robert Wintemute, my secondary supervisor, also deserves special mention, since he offered me invaluable support, both intellectual and moral, on several occasions. My thanks go to my former teacher at Hunter College City University of New York, Professor Joan Tronto, who inspired me and encouraged me to purse this project. I am also grateful to Professor John Howard and Dr. Bob Mills at King’s College London, Professor Lisa Downing at the University of Exeter and Dr. Robert Gillett Nayia Kamenou Page 2 of 343 at Queen Mary University for reading and commenting on specific parts of this thesis. Last, but certainly not least, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to my friends and family. My special thanks go to Chrysostomos Georgiou for always being there for me, to Melanie Christou for being a great listener and to Petros Tryphonides for being a devoted friend. My deepest thanks are owned to my parents, Vassos and Vassiliki, who supported me emotionally and financially and who never stopped believing in me, even when I did not believe in myself. I dedicate this project to them. Of course, all errors of fact and interpretation remain my own. Nayia Kamenou Page 3 of 343 Abstract Based on research conducted from September 2008 through June 2011, this thesis explores the construction of gender and sexuality identities in Cyprus vis-à-vis the socio-political, legal and cultural context within which it is enabled or inhibited. More specifically, it examines how predominant discourses of nationhood and national identity as well as the processes, norms, institutions and mechanisms of Europeanization, affect local approaches to the relationship between national identity, gender and sexuality. Chronologically, the thesis covers the period between the early 1990s – when a Cypriot gay man brought a case before the European Court of Human Rights against the Republic of Cyprus – up to the present. However, it also makes references to the 1974 Turkish invasion and occupation of the island, as well as to the events that preceded and followed it, since these have been determinative of the importance assigned to Cypriot national identity narratives by local actors. Part of the data examined includes fifty-five interviews with prelates of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus, Greek-Cypriot political elites, military officials, representatives of women’s groups, as well as Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans* and queer individuals and activists. Through the utilization of a research design that draws on Foucaultian analysis, queer theory, law and national identity studies, the thesis argues that the Cypriot discursive landscape both restricts and enables the negotiation and reconfiguration of identity-formation processes. Namely, although nationalistic, androcentric, patriarchical and heterocentric essentialisms continue to permeate the Cypriot socio-political milieu, nationalism is characterized both by inherent contradictions and by the ability to reinvent itself. When this is combined with the influence of external, supranational, European discourses of gender, sexuality and identity, then the possibilities of gender and sexual agency are augmented, as long as local actors manage to employ such discourses in ways that do not annihilate local modalities of gender and sexual existence. Nayia Kamenou Page 4 of 343 Table of Contents Page Acknowledgements 2 Abstract 4 List of Abbreviations 8 List of Illustrations 10 Introduction 12 Chapter One: Who Speaks the Nation? Cypriot Discourses of Belonging and Exclusion 48 Introduction 49 Theories of Nationalism and the Question of Agency in Identity Construction 51 Hierarchies of Agency: National Belonging and Exclusion in Cyprus 58 Setting the Background: The Greek-Cypriot and the Turkish-Cypriot Gaze 58 Who Speaks the Nation? The Pervasive Role of the Church of Cyprus 70 Nationalist Constructions of Gender and Sexuality 81 Conclusion 99 Nayia Kamenou Page 5 of 343 Chapter Two: Mobilization Obstacles and Opportunities 102 Introduction 103 Approaches to the Gender-Nationalism Relationship: Women as Victims and Perpetrators 105 Cypriot Women’s Groups and National Projects 114 Europe and the Periphery: Women’s Movements, Feminist Movements and Women in Movements 133 Conclusion 144 Chapter Three: ‘Cyprus is the Country of Heroes, Not of Homosexuals’: Legalizing and Demonizing Non- Heteronormative Sexuality 148 Introduction 149 The Modinos v. Cyprus Case: Challenging Cypriot Gender and Sexuality Discursive Regimes 152 The Marangos v. Cyprus Case: Challenging LGBTQ Discrimination in the Public Sphere 164 Supranational

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