Alexandra Halkias's Books

The Empty Cradle of Democracy

Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece

By: Alexandra Halkias

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The Empty Cradle of Democracy

Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece

By: Alexandra Halkias

During the 1990s, Greece had a very high rate of abortion at the same time that its low birth rate was considered a national crisis. The Empty Cradle of Democracy explores this paradox. Alexandra Halkias shows that despite Greek Orthodox beliefs that abortion is murder, many Greek women view it as “natural” and consider birth control methods invasive. The formal public-sphere view is that women destroy the body of the nation by aborting future citizens. Scrutiny of these conflicting cultural beliefs enables Halkias’s incisive critique of the cornerstones of modern liberal democracy, including the autonomous “individual” subject and a polity external to the private sphere. The Empty Cradle of Democracy examines the complex relationship between nationalism and gender and re-theorizes late modernity and violence by exploring Greek representations of human agency, the fetus, national identity, eroticism, and the divine. Halkias’s analysis combines telling fragments of contemporary Athenian culture, Greek history, media coverage of abortion and the declining birth rate, and fieldwork in Athens at an obstetrics/gynecology clinic and a family-planning center. Halkias conducted in-depth interviews with one hundred and twenty women who had had two or more abortions and observed more than four hundred gynecological exams at a state family-planning center. She reveals how intimate decisions and the public preoccupation with the low birth rate connect to nationalist ideas of race, religion, freedom, resistance, and the fraught encounter between modernity and tradition. The Empty Cradle of Democracy is a startling examination of how assumptions underlying liberal democracy are betrayed while the nation permeates the body and understandings of gender and sexuality complicate the nation-building projects of late modernity.

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Page Count

431

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0822386046

ISBN 13

9780822386049

Post-War Eugenics, Reproductive Choices and Population Policies in Greece, 1950s–1980s

By: Alexandra Barmpouti

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Post-War Eugenics, Reproductive Choices and Population Policies in Greece, 1950s–1980s

By: Alexandra Barmpouti

This book sheds light on the history of Greek eugenics during the post-war period. At this time, eugenics had already been condemned by international declarations. Alexandra Barmpouti, however, challenges the assumption that eugenics disappeared and confirms the continuity of eugenics after the Second World War. She looks at the Greek paradigm because it included the establishment of a eugenics society in 1953 and revealed the contact of Greek eugenicists with renowned British and American birth control advocates. The book covers for the first time the untold history of contraception in Greece during the 1950s and 1960s when the use of female contraceptives was forbidden. It thus argues that birth control was ideologically based on eugenics. In the same context, the book discusses significant breakthroughs related to eugenics, such as the rise of the feminist movement and the advance of human genetics that took place during this period.

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Page Count

211

Publisher

Springer

Published Date

ISBN 10

3030035689

ISBN 13

9783030035686

Performing Femininity

Dance and Literature in German Modernism

By: Alexandra Kolb

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Performing Femininity

Dance and Literature in German Modernism

By: Alexandra Kolb

This is the first book to analyse the cultural representations of female identity that were created by the interaction between choreography and literary writing in German modernism. It explores the connections between dance, literature and gender discourses with a focus on a key period of the Austro-German dance scene: the years between 1900 and 1933. Drawing on influential feminist and gender theories, this book evaluates the choreographies of leading artists such as Grete Wiesenthal, Mary Wigman, Valeska Gert, Anita Berber, and the sensational 'dream' dancer Madeleine Guipet. In response to growing criticism of ballet, German modern dance reflected and helped shape a reassessment of images of the female, embracing both essentialist and constructionist models of femininity. It also triggered a range of literary responses from dance artists themselves and from contemporary authors - some high-profile, others less well known. This interdisciplinary work offers analyses and part-translations of texts by Alfred Döblin, Frank Wedekind and Carl Sternheim, amongst others, which have to date received little attention in Anglo-American cultural studies due to their unavailability in English.

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Page Count

340

Publisher

Peter Lang

Published Date

ISBN 10

3039113518

ISBN 13

9783039113514

Book's by Alexandra Halkias

The Empty Cradle of Democracy

The Empty Cradle of Democracy

Post-War Eugenics, Reproductive Choices and Population Policies in Greece, 1950s–1980s

Post-War Eugenics, Reproductive Choices and Population Policies in Greece, 1950s–1980s

Performing Femininity

Performing Femininity

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