In the wake of Greece’s 2008 economic collapse, African women in Athens navigated intensified discrimination shaped by the intersecting forces of gender, race and migration status. This feminist ethnography investigates how processes of racialization intersect with gender and migration status to produce complex forms of disadvantage. This book argues that gendered racialization renders these women not only invisible but also hyper-visible in stereotypical ways that heighten their exposure to discrimination and precarity. Through everyday survival tactics, home-making practices and collective mobilization, these women resist exclusion and marginalization. Acting individually and collectively, they work to improve material conditions and gain social intelligibility, ultimately challenging normative boundaries of belonging in contemporary Greece.

Viki Zaphiriou-Zarifi is a scholar-practitioner with over 15 years of experience in gender, migration and development. She has worked with several international agencies, including the UN, and local NGOs in South Asia, Europe and Africa. As Head of Grassroots at ‘Women for Refugee Women’, she led the organization’s empowerment programmes and coordinated its frontline response during the COVID-19 pandemic. She currently serves as a Trustee of ‘Work in Progress Studios’, a non-profit in Athens supporting intersectional creativity and arts education, and as an Advisory Board member for ‘AFROEQUALITY’, an initiative which strengthens African communities in Greece, Italy and Spain through research, empowerment and dissemination activities.

“This is a very intriguing book and I believe it taps into an understudied area as regards to the specific group and issues of racialization in Greece.” • Anastasia Christou, Middlesex University