How Greek musicians weathered an economic crisis bignewsnetwork.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bignewsnetwork.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The pandemic has foregrounded women s exploitation in the home and challenged feminism to once again go beyond middle-class concerns.
1. A Feminist Marriage is Still a Marriage. During the Obama administration, a lot of feminists were getting married and a lot of feminists were writing personal essays about getting married. Their weddings and their marriages, they insisted for a dollar a word, were going to be different. Yes, they were entering into a patriarchal institution, but, like, not in the same way.
Their marriages were going to be
feminist marriages.
The pandemic and its stress on the domestic space have made one thing clear: to function, let alone thrive, the nuclear family requires that someone be exploited.
On the evening of Sunday December 13 the president of the Greek Musicians’ Union stood in front of an empty auditorium at the Athens Music Hall, as thousands watched at home. Opening a virtual concert in support of music workers, his words were emotional – but firm:
We want to make known that the music we love and keeps us company in our most difficult and most beautiful moments, is the result of a complex form of labour, which takes toil, sacrifice and dedication.
The idea that musicians are workers is self-evident – yet somehow often disregarded. As a recent controversy involving the BBC has brought to the fore once again, employers, organisations and the state frequently assume that musicians will perform unpaid, merely for “exposure”.