ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Affective Epistemologies of Antimilima: Feminist Knowledgescapes and Activist Science in Post-Dictatorial Greece (1974–1986)

• In Event: Activist Epistemics and Artefacts 1

English Abstract

This paper examines the feminist birth control movement in post-dictatorial Greece (1974–1986) as a case of activist science that emerged both against and within the regimes of biomedical, church and state authority. It develops the concept of affective epistemologies of antimilima to describe a form of feminist knowledge-making in which emotion, reason, embodiment, and resistance became constitutive forces of epistemic practice.

Antimilima—literally “talking back”—names gesture through which feminists confronted the monopoly of medical expertise on reproduction while creating their own infrastructures of knowing. In self-help groups, feminist magazines, pamphlets, and public workshops, they articulated new vocabularies for contraception and abortion grounded in bodily experience, solidarity, and affective work. These practices did not merely oppose medical knowledge; they remade it, transforming spaces of resistance into sites of epistemic innovation.

I interpret these practices as a feminist knowledgescape, a terrain of activist epistemics where affect and critique, politics and science, resistance and invention coexist. Within this knowledgescape, women and feminists acted as epistemic agents, generating diagnostic and interpretive tools that redefined scientific authority and legitimate reproductive knowledge. The affective epistemologies of antimilima reveal how political protest can function as a site of epistemic production and how the emotional dynamics of confrontation and care may operate as engines of scientific creativity.

By situating the Greek feminist birth control movement within the long twentieth-century history of radical and activist sciences, this paper expands the geography of epistemic resistance. It highlights how movements from Europe’s so-called “peripheries” developed their own technologies of protest. In doing so, they enacted an affective turn in activist science, where feeling, struggle, and situated experience became epistemic resources.

Author

• Evangelia (Lina) Chordaki