Women, Youth and the Economic Crisis in Southern Europe

Abstract

The paper raises questions about how the economic crisis is being played out ‘in place’ taking an embodied, generational and gender perspective. We place in a political context – examining how global realities are experienced in place and argue that we need to look at the every day realities of the crisis from a gendered and generational perspective in order to counter grand narratives of gloom and doom where women (whether old, young, migrant, heterosexual or otherwise) are particular victims. We seek to show how by contextualizing the gendered and generational realities of the crisis in southern Europe can we change the narrative of overwhelming paralyzing crisis to one of potential transformation. We focus on the rise of resistance, solidarity economies and new types of communities in the search for alternatives to neoliberal capitalism by women and youth in southern Europe. We look at how people are organizing differently as a result of the crises, creating news forms of political economic and social relations. Dominant narratives tend to exclude the stories of the unprivileged in such reshapings of political, economic and social relations, this paper is the beginnings of bringing the experience and understandings of women and youth in southern Europe to the centre of the analysis of the economic crisis in Europe.