Feminized labour as public reason in Greek social solidarity clinics and pharmacies

Abstract

Drawing on fieldwork in social solidarity clinics and pharmacies in Greece, this article considers citizens’ initiatives that emerged to redistribute crucial resources under economic crisis and state austerity. Activists and scholars regularly described these interventions as resistance, creativity, or revolution, insisting that solidarity must be politicized. Such framings emphasized conscious, overt, programmatic action, grounded on an assumed sovereign, liberal – and implicitly masculine – political subject. These accounts, while often effective in communicating to the wider public sphere, often erased the feminized, backstage labour of maintenance and repair that kept solidarity running. I attend to how the practical labour of non‐politicized solidarity is constitutive of solidarity worlds and challenges the conceptual reliance of liberalism on autonomy and stance‐taking. The article thus shows that public reason is not exclusively discursive but, rather, entails forms of doing and being that have healing effects on the social body.