ABSTRACT. Greek cinema has been in the limelight of the international film world mainly from 2009, a date that coincided with the beginning of a new wave brought about by the rise of a new generation of filmmakers and the international success of their films, against the backdrop of the Greek economic crisis. Athina Rachel Tsangari is a key figure among those filmmakers, and her cinematic work is being identified by many as central in the so-called “weird wave of Greek cinema.” Recurrent and stereotypical dominant readings, especially Anglophone ones, assign to her highly acclaimed latest film Chevalier (2015) fixed multi-layered characterizations promoting a particularizing hermeneutics underpinned by a discourse of “foreignness” and “otherness.” According to those naturalizing essentialist conceptions, Chevalier is supposed to be necessarily Greek, “female gaze-oriented,” Greek crisis-labeled and weird. Using a point of view inspired by British cultural studies, this paper aims to investigate in a deconstructive manner this case study of “otherness building” transmitted through the dominant readings of the film related to intersectional power relations, including first gender and ethnic issues.

Keywords: cinema; gender; sexuality; masculinity; ethnicity; stereotype

How to cite: Coavoux, Sophie (2018). “Beyond Masculinity, the Female Gaze, and the Greek Crisis: Exploring Athina Rachel Tsangaris’s Chevalier and Its Particularizing Reception,” Journal of Research in Gender Studies 8(2): 144–168.

Received 30 March 2018 • Received in revised form 3 July 2018
Accepted 4 July 2018 • Available online 25 July 2018

doi:10.22381/JRGS8220189