The issue of the post-gender and transgressive identities in contemporary Greek reality in the cinematic work of Panos Koutras

Abstract

The issue of the identities is a subject which has influenced, for many decades art and cinema, it is considered until today as a subject taboo. In his book Dissimilarity and Eroticism, Konstantinos Kyriakos mentions that: “the pursuit of otherness and the lack of similarity in the kind, the class, the religion, the sexuality and the nationality it is orientated in greek space, regarding the sciences of cinema, art and theatre, still in an investigated stage.” (Kyriakos 2001:8). In Greek cinema, the printing of different racial identities it is not a contemporary phenomenon. But this printing is facing changes and mutations
over time. In the older movies, the homosexual is a comic figure that is confronted with racism or as a ridiculous personality, while in the later movies represents mainly the special being who is confronted more with suspiciousness than a human character which is outlined via a “guilt-free look” (Kyriakos 2001). This is a proof that until today the racial issue and the identities constitute a subject taboo in Greek cinema.
So the aim is this “guilt-free look” in the cinema by putting the subject of the racial identity in a second level. As Foucault mentions “the meaning of the gender made possible to batch in an artificial unity anatomic data, biological functions, behaviours, senses and pleasures and permitted the use of this notional unity as causal principal, as ubiquitous meaning. In this way the genre managed to function as the only and the blanket meaning” (Foucault, 1978: 48-51). So by talking for this guilt-free look, essentially we talk for a final aim, which is the voluntary elimination of the gender itself via the science, which is one of the main and the basic principles of the Post-Gender movement.
The cinema, wanting to touch on in such movements and aims, has tried to approach this look. In Greek landscape the filmmaker who has approached more crucial this issue is Panos Koutras. As Jacques Mandelbaum wrote in the newspaper Le Monde that Panos Koutras is someone that deserves to be attended narrowly because he is one of the few Greek directors that really film his country taboos. In his first feature film, The attack of the giant mussaka (1999), a man (Giannis Aggelakis) plays a woman as initial convention and without references in transvestite condition. It constitutes an exemplary camp movie, because it is important the intersexuality as a modification game of the parts which specify the genders (Kyriakos, 2001). In his movie Strella (2009) Koutras approached even more dynamically the issue of the gender and transgressive identity by getting inside in its own root, which is the incestuous relationship of Strella with her father. Judith Butler supports that the negation becomes the establishing moment of what Freud calls “consolidation of the gender”. The boy, by refusing his mother as an object of desire, either internalizes the loss identifying himself with the mother or transfers his heterosexual mooring and in this way fortifies the mooring with his father embedding thus his masculinity (Butler, 1999). With this reasoning we come to the conclusion that the determination of the gender is indissolubly connected with the Oedipus complex and the incest.
The investigative questions that are going to be answered in this research are: How are presented the transgressive identities in the movies of Panos Koutras? How Panos Koutras is approaching the Post-Gender movement? Which is the basic different with the existing greek queer cinema?