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Paper Short Abstract:

A case study of a queer grassroot collaboration formed by ethnically segregated groups in Nicosia, Cyprus. This ethnographic account of a Bicommunal Pride March that took place in a UN-authorized area, brings forth issues of belonging,exclusion and bordering, in Europe's last divided capital.

Paper Abstract:

This presentation follows an ethnographic account of resisting and defying the bordering practices of opposed bureaucracies taking place in Cyprus’ Buffer Zone. Following the events of 1974 that split the island into two separate political entities, a Greek Cypriot sovereign and a Turkish Cypriot de facto state, present-day Cyprus is marked by a temporary-turned-permanent ceasefire lane, the United Nations Buffer Zone. In recent years, a golden passport scheme backed by the sovereign state, has repositioned a class analysis on the right to citizenship and the role of transnational migration in state bordering practices and belonging.

On June 2023, the 2nd Bicommunal Pride March hosted in the UN-authorized area, became a signifying moment for queer activists across the divide, forming a grassroot collaboration that highlighted not only how borders are being enacted on the liminality of sovereignty, but also how they can be bypassed by non-binary activism. The ‘wildflowers’ of Cyprus, an emic symbolism of untamed existence in landscapes of ruination and decay, become a documentation of queer praxis, in ways that defy essentialist notions of gender, nationhood and belonging.

A story about a no-man’s-land where (non)citizenship ceases to exist, where deviant bodies are constantly faced with a ‘temporary (im-)mobility’. Informed by a six month ethnographic fieldwork, this is a case study of a queer breakaway from contested nationalisms that further territorialize ethnic segregation and produce political apathy through spatiotemporal stagnation. Can ‘Queer Cyprus’ bring forth the arbitrariness of bordering, by stating the inherent fluidity of being and moving through chronotopes?