I

One of the most significant developments in the last decade is the rapid shift of analytic focus and research agendas from Women's Studies to Gender Studies. The import of this shift and its theoretical premises and practice has yet to be fully explored. The reasons why this is so are worth considering. I would like to explore the consequence of this shift within the contexts of cultural anthropology and Mediterranean Studies with specific examples from recent ethnographic works on Greece. The way in which the shift from Women's Studies to Gender Studies has been played out in the above discourses may contain theoretical and political implications that have not yet emerged as clearly in other sites of gender theory.

In cultural anthropology the shift to Gender Studies was assumed to be the recontextualisation of Women's Studies in a more relational and holistic framework that would, in itself, not subtract from but enhance Women's Studies. 'Gender Studies' was deployed to foreground the relational dimension of women's issues insofar as all social-sexual identities are theorised to be constructed in a symbiotic fashion. 1 The turn to Gender Studies was meant to inhibit the ghettoisation of women's issues in a self-enclosed field of research and discourse that would be unable to impact on other disciplines and perspectives. We can now ask, has the notion of Gender Studies expanded the discussion and awareness of women's issues or has it simply ended up creating a new restricting objectification of women? What ideological and methodological baggage accompanied the grafting of Gender Studies onto Women's Studies and how has that affected the conceptualisation of women, gender, society, history and political practice? Further, I would like to propose that Gender Studies as described above has been one of a series of encompassing totalisations that seriously restrict the conceptualisation of women's experiences and empowerment. Thus this article will link the social holism of Gender Studies to other totalising structures, including institutional rationality, development ideology, medical discourse, nationalism and ethnicity—particularly as these are evidenced in Southern Europe.

I would suggest that we distinguish between Gender Studies and gender-related issues; the two are not always symmetrical, they do not coincide, though this was the primary unexamined premise of Gender Studies as a research concept. Underlying this premise, however, is the assumption that social experience itself, and women's experience as an unfinished historical project in particular, are reducible to and contained within the frame of Gender Studies. Any move to encompass holistically a subject area, to the extent that it creates an artificial excluding boundary around a set of theoretical problems and imagery, has to be examined critically. Gender Studies did not find gender relations as a ready-made social fact despite its holistic ambitions and realist assumptions. Rather, Gender Studies, like any discipline, constructs the content of what it wishes to study and its first gesture was to circumscribe women in terms of their objectification by the category of gender, i.e. in terms of their points of social intersection with men. However, we can ask: does this circumscription exhaust or encompass the depths of women's socio-historical and cultural realities? Based on my fieldwork on women's resistance and self-empowerment in Southern Greece, my answer to this question is no.

The advent of Gender Studies research concerned with Mediterranean societies was midwifed by the concept of 'gender complementarity'. As I described this model in my ethnography. The Last Word:

The analysis of gender power in... Mediterranean [studies]...has been locked into complementary binary sets. The relative empowerment of women in the Mediterranean has been conceived as a narrow inversion of categories and domains defined by male-dominated institutions and spheres of interaction.... Attempts to surpass binarism by a dialectical analysis of gender relations changes nothing. Dialectical analysis, like binarism, presupposes that identities are formed in a shared social totality.... [The Last Word} reveals the interdiction of social totality by women's...practices, thus questioning the binary or dialectical encompassment of gender identities in a shared social whole and the notion of social totality itself.²

There are many assumptions that automatically fall out from the model of gender complementarity. First is holism, which presumes that social relations can be totalised, in this case as gender relations, which in turn are made to fit into a closed social whole called society. The notion of society as a completed totality that is implicitly promoted by the theory of gender complementarity has serious consequences for the notions of social development, historical transformation and the political emancipation of subordinate groups. If society is a completed whole, if gender relations constitute a symmetrical social totality, how do society and gender undergo historical transformation, how is that whole inserted into the flux and contingency of history and uneven, disarticulated social change? This model of gender complementarity and social totality presumes a homeostatic model of a social order to be a base-line condition from which all social processes originate and to which they return. Thus under the model of gender complementarity, acts of resistance or self-empowerment by women are role reversals or inversions. Such concepts as inversion and reversion always carry within them a teleology of return, a swing back to the 'normal', homeostatic condition. Thus Herzfeld, a British-American anthropologist who is considered to be a leading expert on Greece, using the model of gender complementarity, recently claimed that Cretan women 'resisted' male hegemony through silence because Cretan males assert their dominance through language and rhetorical display.^ Here women's resistance is conceived of as a negativity, a lack, or absence, that creates nothing, that does nothing, in comparison to the linguistic exhibitionism of the male order. In a recent publication from the University of the Aegean, Greek male anthropologists asserted that any relations of gender domination, oppression, or asymmetry that could be discerned in Greek kinship systems are simply a 'skewing' of the systemic balance of gender complementarity.⁴

In my ethnography of Greek women's culture of resistance I concluded that gender identity exclusively determined by binary classifications is a relatively recent historical development. This is opposed to the standard view of most female and male ethnographers of Greece who posit binary gender classifications as a pregiven, static and ahistorical constant in Greek culture. Furthermore, this emphasis on symbiotic binary categories on the part of certain theorists coincides with the binary tendencies of the dominant discourse of modernisation in the Mediterranean and particularly Greece.

Polarities advanced by modernisation ideology such as past/present, country/city, ritual/ science....also generate a reified binary opposition of women to men. This neat dyadic structure is, in effect, a crucial stage and mechanism in the current internal colonisation of women's consciousness. Many areas of female symbolic practice and representation were not organised around male/female binary sets...The plurality of cognitive and practical domains where men and women interfaced through binary categories, albeit in a hierarchical manner, were relativised by the many domains in which women did not work with gender-bifurcated codes. There was an entire domain of autonomous female cognition and symbolisation that was not a mirrored refraction of male representations and was not carved out of male/female dyads....With the penetration of modernisation, the rigidification of the division of labor between genders and between city and country, and the magnification of the social distance between public and private spheres, male/female dichotomies have been essentialised...^

As evidenced by the two examples of complementarity theory given above, numerous male scholars exploit the concept of 'Gender Studies' to establish themselves as instant experts on the topic of men and women because by speaking on the subject of men and as men they were also automatically addressing women's issues. Many male gender experts have exploited this instant authorisation to colonise the representation of women. They have done so by assuming that male/female relations can be treated with the same realist representational strategies as other social problems and by rarely considering crucial self-reflexive epistemological issues: to what extent the 'master' or dominant subject in a relation of power with a subaltern can ever imagine and reconstruct the position of the dominated, without first undergoing an ideological and biographical death-experience as defined by Paulo Freire (in relation to pedagogical relations) and by Frantz Fanon and Jean Genet (in relation to race relations). And I would point out it is this experience of personal defamiliarisation that should be cultivated in the ethnographic practice of cultural and gendered self-reflexivity.

The problem of gender mediated self-reflexivity, which addresses the historical and political positioning of the researcher is easily pushed to the margins by the naturalistic and synchronic bias of gender complementarity. For in this context, imagining the Other simply becomes an exercise in self-inversion or role reversal. This is how a male British-American scholar can imagine the silence of a Cretan woman as resistance. The inversion here is double, it occurs not only between genders but between cultures that are also entangled in asymmetric relations of power.

II

The taming of difference that can be ascertained in the methodological priorities of Gender Studies is a process that can be encountered beyond theory at the level of practice. This encounter mandates future research agendas. These agendas will entail the establishment of a critical relationship in which Women's Studies sets the program for Gender Studies and serves as the epistemological anchor of the latter, thus providing it with a historical and cultural reflexivity. This is so because the domination of women, as with other subordinate groups, persistently situates them at the inner motors of historical process and social structure. Thus the following issues are both current political problems and potential and necessary topics of critical inquiry for Gender Studies.

For example, there are frequent calls to install and to expand the roles and decision-making profiles of women in institutional policy-making. Although this is a laudable goal it is necessary to point out that in Western society, bureaucratic culture, decision-making cultures, and other similar formalisms have their own internal gendered history and gender-biased epistemologies. What anthropology terms 'the culture of the state' has to be subjected to ethnographic and political analyses in order to ascertain its dissonance or active conflict with the embedded everyday female vernacular in modes of perception, decision-making and acting. Inserting women into institutional slots, besides confirming tacit ideologies of essentialism, does not prevent a silent censorship where women's experience, language and culture can be rendered inadmissible in the institutional settings; settings whose core-rationality and power is based on circumscribing the frame of political discourse and reference. The dissemination of a universal rationality of decision-making and its self-protective neutral and procedural facades can have a destructive impact on women's local culture and perceptual orientations when these are repositioned within new institutional and political frameworks.

The movement of women into positions of power and decision-making must also be a moment of cultural, historical and biographical translation and importation which calls into question the presumed gender-neutrality of institutional models of communication, representation, and truth claiming. Though the participation of women in institutional decision-making is partly the consequence of a redistributed power,⁶ women should not be content with a distributional mode of empowerment by itself. Formal distribution of power and privileges do not guarantee empowerment. The latter is a practice and a process, not merely a position. A performative model of power is also required. Distributional models of empowerment assume the givenness of political centres while performative power decentres, and constructs new centres and new relational networks.

Performance speaks to power as poesis, that is practices of making and imagining, that transform the socially given into something novel, unfamiliar and even exotic. This model pluralizes the concept and tangible practice of power by identifying strategies of resistance that emerge and subsist in the margins...A group exposed to external and internal domination... experiences cultural fragmentation as the very condition of its existence. There can be no holistic experience in the margins.... The experience of break and discontinuity prevails in the margins. The myth of holism and continuity is the ideological creation of centers and of dominating groups. 7

When women attempt to articulate our research agenda to problems of development and social policy intervention, it should not only be a matter of studying women's cultures to facilitate the smooth insertion of institutional policy and practice. The latter is a seduction theory of social change. In a historically naive fashion this theory assumes that institutional practice is infinitely malleable and can be easily sterilised of all gendered optics and bias through formal procedures.

For example, public health programs which are grounded and legitimised by scientific rationality, disseminate models of embodiment and concepts of socio-biological risk that actively construct an iconic female body. The simple insertion of women into the decision-making apparatuses of public health institutions will not guarantee the representation of gender perspectives if Western scientific rationality and class and culture-bound concepts of risk are allowed to screen out and/or mediate the terms of analytic reference. The medicalisation of risk applied to the female body carries with it androcentric categories that negate the concrete experience of women. When Women's Studies asks for comparative analyses between metropolitan cultures and third world cultures on health issues such as infant mortality, reproduction technologies, etc., this ethic of comparativity should also be applied within a society between women's somatic experience and the local social administration of health. This comparative analysis would look at diverse and contending concepts of the body, at the social agencies of doctor and patient, society, at the gendering of risk, at concepts of social cost, and communicative practice.

III

The blurring of differences between institutional culture and women's culture usually takes place through the adoption of denotations such as sexism in tandem with the silent erasure of the experiential connotations of the term. Iconographies of gendered domination are emptied of tangible content so that they can be circulated as rhetorical currency within legal, political and media discourses. This is not only the effect of rhetoric but also of the effacement of contexts by which certain gender-specific experiences and meanings are jettisoned as they are shifted from everyday experience to institutional prescription, from one sector of a society to another and from one culture to another. Gender Studies must pay close attention to the exchange rates—the semantic and experiential costs in the conversion of gender-based political knowledge from one discursive site to another. Once, women would not have been recognised as legitimate and viable political subjects; today in many societies the formal recognition of their civil political subject status can blur the real chasms between institutional representation or the stylisations of public culture and the complexity and turbulence of everyday life experience.

A disturbing variation of this colonisation and silencing of women's everyday life experience by state culture has recently emerged in Eastern Europe and other places, where ideologies of nationalism and ethnicity have absorbed the autonomous identities of womens' politics and rearchaicised the position of women subsuming them under holistic categories and totalities of race, language, ethnic group, and the family and the domestic space as nationalist icons. When nationalism or ethnicity become the defining concept of women's identity, gender domination is both rhetorically expelled from the corporate group (ethnic or national) and actively displaced onto the women of adversary nationalities and ethnicities. Hence cross-ethnic sexual violence becomes a common political practice while sexism itself ceases to be a salient political concept or norm within the reductive homogeneity of an ethnicised public culture. This is a dramatic example, but a similar disjuncture between formal institutional culture and women's everyday experience exists in Greek academia where sexual harassment and generic forms of sexism persist alongside the conceptual absence of the term in the collegial atmosphere of dialogue and the pursuit of knowledge, in professorial discourse and in classroom curricula.

The extent that this process is crucial to both Gender Studies and women's politics can be ascertained by asking theoretical and practical questions about the relation of the state to women's social movements. What happens when social movements, and most particularly their agendas and modes of expression, become appropriated by the institutional culture of the state? Does the movement disappear with the absorption of its agenda? Does the state now define and direct the wave of popular mobilisation animated by the social movement?

These processes usually emerge through the active denial of subjectivation. Subjectivation is the historical process whereby new political agents (subjects) are formed and attempt to achieve representation in public and political culture. The emergence of new political subjects and the formal repression of the process of subjectivation results in the radical disarticulation of public and private spheres, official and vernacular languages and symbology, collective representation and everyday life. This instigates the necessity of social movements through which the unrecognised and often discredited semantic resources and experiences of everyday life are forced into public discourse and collective perception. The new social movements, such as feminism, historically arise as organisations of the experience of the unrepresented and the inadmissible, of the politics of everyday life. Armed with these former exclusions, social movements, if they outlast repression, challenge the content and scope of civil society as defined by institutional orders, thereby compelling these orders, to produce new legislation, embark on internal restructuring or suffer the collapse of their legitimacy. The role of social movements is always to recover, express, codify and maintain the ongoing disjuncture between the state and civil society, between official ideology and everyday experience. The life history of a social movement cannot terminate in the social dream of a parity and the final reconciliation of opposites. Rather, cultural disjuncture is both the origin, the means and the unfinished project of the social movement when it remains autonomous of the state, yet always engaged with it in the struggle for public life. The forcible inclusion of women's experience into public culture advances social struggle as the struggle over the representation and ownership of the poetics of history itself. This struggle poses, engages and creates new languages, spaces and practices of alterity that require documentation. The central problem of Women's Studies and the women's movement is how to recuperate the alterity of women's everyday life experience as a political force.

IV

This problem was brought to the fore for me in a recent discussion that appeared in the Greek media which asked the question: Is there a women's poetry in Greece? The very fact that this question had to be asked and that women poets did not offer a clear answer is ironic. I had just finished an ethnography on women in Greece defining our poesis:

I follow women's cultural response to the historical fragmentation as they weave together diverse social practices: dreaming, lament improvisation, care and tending of olive trees, burying and unburying the dead, and the historical inscription of emotions and senses on a landscape of persons, things, and places. These practices compose the empowering poetics of the periphery. Here poetics communicates with the Greek concept of poesis, which means both making and imagining. For the poetics of the periphery is always concerned with the imaginary dimension of material worlds, of things and persons made and unmade.

My response therefore to the question 'Is there a women's poetry in Greece?' is affirmative; but women's poetics is one that, unlike men's is barred from Greek public culture, it is a poetics that leads a subterranean existence in daily acts of meaning-creating social resistance: in women's life-spaces, in women's creation and handling of material artifacts and culture in their divination practices, in their representation of death, in the sensory-perceptual organisation of their life worlds.

And i can think of women's embroidering and weaving throughout the centuries. It always occurred after daily routine labor. And although it involved work and the creation of articles of economic and symbolic value, it has always been experienced by women as 'a resting moment...' After ordering her immediate world, her household the fields, she will halt, step back and begin to weave dreams, desires, musings into cloth. Women never embroider one piece or one design. They embroider series and sequences that cohere into a visual, tactile story. An embroidery piece captures a dream or an imaging, and women do not dream once. Such multiple, sequential production is not necessarily motivated by the accumulation of wealth or caused by economic circumstances demanding overproduction. It is their form of writing which, spread on cloth, ornaments and names people and spaces, within and beyond the household. Just like the ornaments Yannis Ritsos, the celebrated poet, left us: 'To you I leave my clothes, my poems, my shoes. Wear them on Sundays.'

The embroiderer, alone or with other women, borrows and elaborates the designs of others in a form of exchange. She is externalising pieces of the self to make it public. Women circulate knowledge through multiple designs and spaces which they cover, protect and ornament. It is this transfer of the self into substance that disseminates a history of the person in dispersal. Embroidering engages a self-reflexive femininity: she will endow artifacts with her content and yet allow them to speak for themselves.¹⁰

Based on this perspective, the dissemination of new technologies and the shaping of gender relations and new division of labour should be analysed from the perspective of women's material culture which frequently has no official structural or discursive position in the economy and is not recognised as a system or institution. However, displacements created by new technologies cannot be fully assessed unless women's material culture is examined, insofar as the latter addresses the questions of labour, nature, object relations, concepts of the body, time and space, and notions of material reciprocity.

As women wrote themselves into history through political mobilisation they realised the extent to which they ha^been written out of history by official records. This brought to the fore and generated the need for Women's Studies. The women's movement sets the research agenda for Women's Studies by exploring political issues, inventing new forms of social agency and creating the need for historical models that could inform contemporary political practice. At the same time, Women's Studies began to function as an important cultural resource for women activists by supplying models and agendas, by showing how agendas had changed and/or blocked. 'Women's Studies' has functioned as symbolic capital. The women's movement is also an object of study for Women's Studies; it has a history that must be recorded and analysed as a guide for future practice. Women's Studies is thus the institutional memory of the women's movement in particular and women's culture in general. It should also function as an empowering discourse that can engage, counter and contest other discourses of power, such as those of the state, medicine, law and religion when they objectify women in light of their respective institutional histories and agendas.

Women's Studies provides historical and cultural comparativity and thus promotes ideational exchanges between women who are separated in time and space. It is a continuation of the on-the-ground social reciprocity between women in face-to-face relations and alliances. Its viability in academia is based on its cross disciplinary pertinence. It can transgress all disciplinary boundaries through the overarching categories of gender and women. It reveals hidden histories and other sides to what established disciplines study and have little access to without the interpretive languages of Gender Studie's.

When it comes to the political recovery of the validity of women's everyday life structure, there is a wealth of material from the periphery, in Europe and elsewhere, that can serve as valuable resources, allegories and symbolic capital for Women's Studies or Gender Studies.¹¹ However, it is interesting that the research model most congruent with the political recovery and mobilisation of women's everyday life experience, ethnography, is (like Women's Studies) fighting, almost at the same time, for discursive and institutional space in these areas and in Greece in particular. It is no coincidence that ethnography and Women's Studies are both in search of alternative epistemologies, and are contingent on participatory inquiries where knowledge is co-constructed on the ground and in practice, through processes that anticipate emancipatory models and norms of political communication. The survival of Women's Studies and cross-cultural and cross-gender ethnographic sensitivities in Greece and other peripheries demands that both disciplines, anthropology and Women's Studies, engage with the academy, the media and political institutions, without being absorbed by or completely identified with them. To the extent that they maintain an independent foot-hold in women's everyday life, any such existing autonomous institutions concerned with women's issues and interests are reflections of the persisting and struggling autonomy of women in the structures of gender.

Notes
This article isbased on the keynote speech at the UNESCO-KEGME International Seminar on 'Gender Studies Towards the Year 2000,' June 1993, Athens. (See also S. Magarey, 'Gender Studies in Greece', Australian Feminist Studies, no. 18, Summer 1993.)

1. See for example Annette Weiner, Women of Value, Men of Renown (University of Texas Press) Austin, 1976; Rayna Reiter, Towards an Anthropology of Women (Monthly Review Press) New York, 1975; Jill Dubisch (ed.). Gender and Power in Rural Greece (Princeton University Press) Princeton, 1986; Peter Loizos & Evthimios Papataxiarchis (eds). Contested Identities: Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece (Princeton University Press) Princeton, 1991; Michael Herzfeld, 'Silence, Submission and Subversion:
Toward a Poetics of Womanhood' in Loizos & Papataxiarchis, Contested Identities', Jane Schneider & Peter Schneider, Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily (Academic Press) New York, 1976; Jane Cowan, Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece (Princeton University Press) Princeton, 1990;
Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (University of California Press) Berkeley, 1990.
2. C. Nadia Seremetakis, The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani (University of Chicago Press) Chicago, 1991, p. 6. Greek translation, Nea Sinora Press, 1994.
3. Herzfeld, 'Silence, Submission and Subversion*.
4. Loizos & Papataxiarchis, Contested Identities.
5. Seremetakis, The Last Word, p. 222.
6. The access to these positions, of course, was the consequence of extra-institutional agitation, legal and legislative reform.
7. Seremetakis, The Last Word, pp. 1-2.
8. Seremetakis, The Last Word, p. 1.
9. Plato, The Symposium (Platonos Symposion), ed. I. Sikoutris (Estia) Athens, 1976, p.150.
10. Seremetakis (ed.), The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (Westview Press) Boulder, 1994, p. 15.
11. Seremetakis (ed.). Ritual, Power and the Body: Historical Perspectives on the Representation of Greek Women (Pella Publishing Co.) New York, 1993. Greek translation, Nea Sinora Press, 1994.

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