Paper short abstract:

An ethnography of feminized labor in solidarity-based clinics and pharmacies in austerity in Greece highlights the militancy of everyday maintenance in the work of care provision, and the power of politically salient acts that go beyond public reason

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork in social solidarity clinics and pharmacies in Greece, this paper centers on citizens' initiatives that emerged to redistribute medicines and healthcare in the context of economic crisis and state austerity. Activists and scholars regularly described these interventions as examples of resistance, creativity, or even revolution, insisting on the overt politicization of solidarity. Such framing emphasized conscious, programmatic action, grounded on an assumed sovereign, liberal—and implicitly masculine—political subject. These accounts, while often effective in communicating organizers' goals in dominant public spheres, often erased the feminized, backstage labor of maintenance and repair that kept solidarity running. I attend to how the practical labor of non-politicized solidarity is constitutive of solidarity worlds and challenges the conceptual reliance of liberalism on autonomy and stance-taking. In doing so, the presentation ask whether public reason is an exclusively semiotic act and considers the public sphere beyond “communicative action”.