Généalogie d’une enquête sur les « étranger-e-s du dedans ». Entretien avec Eleni Varikas

• Published in: Genre, sexualité & sociéte Vol. 7; no. 7
• Main Authors: Varikas, Eleni, Clair, Isabelle
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; French
• Published: Genre, Sexualité et Société 01.06.2012
• Subjects: categorization; feminism; race; reflexivity; sexualities
• ISSN: 2104-3736; 2104-3736
• DOI: 10.4000/gss.2384

Eleni Varikas is a professor of political science at the University of Paris 8 and with the « Gender, Work, Mobilities » team at the Cresppa laboratory. In 1986 she argued a dissertation in history, entitled « Women revolt. Genesis of feminist consciousness in 19th-century Greece (1883-1908) ». Combining an historical approach with political theory, and attentive to the expression of subjectivities, she has subsequently devoted herself not just to feminists and women but to all those excluded from the Republic , a collection of outcasts to whom she has devoted a book : Les Rebuts du monde [The Refuse of the World] (2007). In this interview, conducted in January of 2012, Eleni Varikas retraces the genesis of her research on the construction of the inhuman other, colonized and enslaved outside the European continent, racialized and minoritized inside it. Scientific, historical, political, and biographical reasons mix in the talk of a feminist who came from Greece in the 1970’s, strengthened by the experience of struggle against dictatorship and nourished by democratic ideals, as she divulges her reasons for embarking on an endless investigation of the outcast, the « stranger from within » who bumps into theinvisible wallsof "a world claiming to haveabolished the privilegesof birth"(Penser le sexe et le genre [Think sexand gender],2006).