Response to Theodora Patrona’s (Aristotle University) talk,
“Boy Meets Boy and Girl Meets Girl: Foregrounding the Greek American Queer Narrative”
(SNFPHI, University Seminar in Modern Greek)
Today’s event creates a much-needed forum for critical peer review in Greek American and diaspora studies. I approach this meeting as a public workshop for a project in its early stages. I do realize the risks involved in making one’s early research public; however, I see it as my responsibility to offer critical commentary, which I view as constructive feedback.
1. Kelly Ann McWilliam, Girl Meets Girl: Lesbian Romantic Comedies and the Public Sphere. PhD Dissertation. University of Queensland, Australia, 2006).
by Yiorgos Anagnostou
I thank the University Seminar in Modern Greek, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative (SNFPHI), and the Program in Hellenic Studies, for making this event possible. I express my appreciation to Dimitris Antoniou for inviting me and for including Ergon in the collaboration. The following is a somewhat revised version of my seminar response.
I thank the University Seminar in Modern Greek, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative (SNFPHI), and the Program in Hellenic Studies, for making this event possible. I express my appreciation to Dimitris Antoniou for inviting me and for including Ergon in the collaboration. The following is a somewhat revised version of my seminar response.
***
Today’s event creates a much-needed forum for critical peer review in Greek American and diaspora studies. I approach this meeting as a public workshop for a project in its early stages. I do realize the risks involved in making one’s early research public; however, I see it as my responsibility to offer critical commentary, which I view as constructive feedback.
The title of Dr. Patrona’s talk is “Boy Meets Boy and Girl Meets Girl: Foregrounding the Greek American Queer Narrative.” The phrasing “Girl Meets Girl and Boy Meets Boy” recalls a trope commonly used in the context of queering the genre of romantic comedy. It destabilizes the heterosexual norm “Boy Meets Girl,” directing attention to lesbian and gay sexual desires (1).
The title also connects Greek America with the category “queer.”
I appreciate the author’s interest in what she calls “queer Greek American subjectivities.” Dr. Patrona’s work highlights a corpus of four texts—two works of fiction and two memoirs (2)—and reflects on the subjectivities these texts narrate. She builds on recent conversations on this topic and offers further insights via a close reading of the texts. In the broadest terms, the research contributes to a subject about which we have scattered and scant knowledge.
The talk foregrounds the experiences of persons embodying non-normative sexualities in relation to several institutions, both “ethnic” and “non-ethnic”: the family, community, church, public school, and the medical establishment. In the 1970s, 1980s, and well into the 1900s, the power of these institutions sought to regulate and punish “uncomfortable desires” (3). Violence was inflicted upon non-normative bodies, harming the persons it sought to discipline. Normative institutions scarred and traumatized individuals, creating heavy “psychosocial burdens.”
Dr. Patrona’s analysis contributes to our understanding of the effects of oppressive social discourses on non-normative subjects and, in turn, how these subjects act upon domination to articulate opposition, seek healing, and fashion the Self in resistance to normative expectations. For the autobiographers, writing their story is an act of reclamation and liberation. The talk focuses on their personal negotiations with the immigrant and the broader world. These are life-defining personal projects involving agency in the making of and finding balances within multifaceted selves.
The angle of the analysis of all four texts zooms on the inner and social battles associated with the fashioning or reinventing eclectic selves. Here, we find ourselves in the domain of parental power—and more specifically dyadic relations like mother-son or father-daughter—trauma and agency. This is a theoretical and cultural domain that requires deep probing.
While the analysis focuses on oppressive institutions, I wonder about the function of liberatory social spaces in the making and performance of queer subjectivity. Where, specifically, do subjects opt to make their sexuality public, and what considerations play out in their decision? In Annie Liontas’s novel Let Me Explain You, for example, the character’s choosing of the social space for her “coming out” is purposeful, taking into consideration not only the needs of the Self but feelings about beloved others. It will be productive then to examine this process of performing sexuality within the texts under investigation. What social spaces are available and how do characters negotiate prohibiting settings?
It would be productive too, to extend the discussion and include the public spaces in real life where the authors find allies and create inclusive communities.
At this extra-textual level, it is the publishing industry that offers the space for the authors to engage with complex issues, such as family violence, cruelty, mental health, and uncomfortable sexual desires, which, one must note, the Greek American public sphere largely hides. We can benefit from a cartography of queer subjectivity and its negotiations in the public sphere.
In this respect, interconnecting the factual with the fictional might produce valuable insights. To what communities and social relations do the characters and the narrativized selves participate, and what does this tell us about the social geographies of the Greek American Queer Narrative?
To add yet another dimension on the question of queering the Greek American public sphere: Toward its conclusion, the talk mentions the pioneering work of Leah Fygetakis. This raises the question about how the four texts in the talk relate to the insights and questions posed by pioneers in the field of Greek American sexuality. In her essay “Leah with an “H” or How I am Jewish, But Not Really” (4) Fygetakis shares her longing for a US Greek lesbian community, which was not at the time available to her. She finds a sense of partial belonging in a community based on sexuality but not ethnicity.
In the context of second-wave feminism, Constance Callinicos participates in an intercultural and sexuality diverse gathering of women who subvert in private traditional gendered dictates in folk dancing. If the North American “politics of gay and lesbian liberation hinge on strategies of queer visibility” (5), it seems to me necessary to probe the question of “queering the Greek American Narrative” in connection to practices negotiating visibility in particular pasts. Where was the narrative articulated in the 1970s and in the 1990s? Where is it performed now? Have there been any changes in the power relations and institutional realities that mediate it? In other words, the diasporic narrative calls for historicization.
The corpus of the four texts in today’s talk renders queer subjectivities visible. What kind of cultural and political work does this visibility perform? From my perspective, this visibility interrogates the grand ethnic narrative of family cohesion and success. It demonstrates families failing their non-normative children; depression and violence lurk behind the veneer of the model Greek ethnicity. In naming these processes, the texts produce knowledge confronting the truth of foundational Greek American narratives. They expose the harm that revered institutions do by hiding or demonizing situations that cause individuals to bleed. If queering a narrative in the broadest sense means resisting essentialism (6), and if, indeed, it means identifying practices within a group that the group denies or rejects, then this corpus queers the ethnic or diasporic narrative.
But this is my reading. I would like to hear more from Dr. Patrona about what she calls “Greek American Queer Narrative,” the kind of political work it performs.
The focus on queer subjectivities produces hidden or suppressed truths. We may wish to think deeper about the politics of alternative truths. I have in mind the specificity of interventions that particular genres enable. Autobiography, for instance, produces knowledge that can be utilized as evidence to undermine grand ethnic narratives.
Along these lines, can we think of how queer literary and popular culture could undermine normative Greek America? This inquiry will benefit by exploring the work of authors with different politics of queerness offering different strategies of intervention. We could probe the broader transnational field: the fiction of Christos Tsiolkas, for example and his politics; the films of Anna Kokkinos; Zack Stratis’ film Could Be Worse! The poetry of Olga Broumas. I wonder about the place of David Sedaris in this conversation. What do we make of Gus Constantellis’s bold––“on your face”––Greek Brooklyn queer comedy?
This returns us to the question of a queer public sphere. It is important to bring these Greek Australian, Greek American, Greek, and other texts into conversation to explore the range of context-specific strategies authors use to undermine diasporic normalizations. There is scholarship comparing Greek and Greek Australian queer films (7). The comparative approach will hopefully attract scholars globally, empowering diasporic queer studies.
I now turn my attention to theory. Dr. Patrona’s talk enters a field of knowledge notable for its political and theoretical sophistication. Terms such as “queer,” “lesbian,” “gay,” “homosexual,” “identity,” are not self-evident categories. They are debated rigorously, producing a nuanced understanding of the work these categories perform. This theoretical field has a genealogy and is vastly complex.
To identify some contours of this terrain: Queerness is a theoretical and political project deconstructing binaries and resisting essentialisms. It recognizes identities as fluid and unstable. A thread in this conversation, therefore, rejects identity-based renderings of sexuality as a practice reproducing essentialism. Some theorists find the term “queer” problematic for their projects. They use expansive definitions of the term “lesbian” to foreground the historical specificity of lesbians and lesbian culture, noting that this specificity is not acknowledged “by the categories ‘queer’ and ‘gay.’” Hence the uneasiness about lesbian specificity being obscured by “supposedly ‘gender neutral’ categories like ‘queer’” (8). Still, individuals involved in same-sex love in Greece reject the category “lesbian.” What is more, since the 1990s, we have witnessed a theoretical and cultural “shift from gay to queer” (9). Scholars theorize queerness as an embodied experience.
The talk today seems to employ the terms queer, lesbian, and gay interchangeably. Greek American analysis of queer material needs to situate it in relation to the academic field “queer studies.”
In closing, I wish to refer to another domain the talk enters. Dr. Patrona’s presentation refers to it as “ethnic,” though toward the conclusion, there is mention of a “transnational angle.” The reference to transnationalism inevitably introduces the domain “diaspora” in connection to queerness.
I introduce the term “diaspora” purposefully, because of the analytical possibilities it offers. Diaspora connotes geographic and cultural mobilities, inviting us to explore negotiations of sexuality in connection to time and place. There is rich scholarship on the intersections of queer and diaspora studies, guiding this key question: what is at stake in queering diaspora? Here, in the interest of time, I will only mention that interconnecting sexuality with histories of mobilities raises questions of how ideas of sexuality travel, and how they are shaped via border-crossing; how sexual non-normativity generates desires to emigrate, and how material and symbolic conditions at the new home shape articulations of sexuality in specific spaces. Based on my reading of Joanna Eleftheriou and Annie Liontas’s work, their accounts invite this kind of inquiry. One negotiates non-normativity differently in a village in Crete and Philadelphia, Cyprus and New York City.
I will stop here. I thank you once again for providing me with the opportunity to think about these issues and for participating. I’m looking forward to the conversation. Thank you.
February 28, 2024
Notes
The talk foregrounds the experiences of persons embodying non-normative sexualities in relation to several institutions, both “ethnic” and “non-ethnic”: the family, community, church, public school, and the medical establishment. In the 1970s, 1980s, and well into the 1900s, the power of these institutions sought to regulate and punish “uncomfortable desires” (3). Violence was inflicted upon non-normative bodies, harming the persons it sought to discipline. Normative institutions scarred and traumatized individuals, creating heavy “psychosocial burdens.”
Dr. Patrona’s analysis contributes to our understanding of the effects of oppressive social discourses on non-normative subjects and, in turn, how these subjects act upon domination to articulate opposition, seek healing, and fashion the Self in resistance to normative expectations. For the autobiographers, writing their story is an act of reclamation and liberation. The talk focuses on their personal negotiations with the immigrant and the broader world. These are life-defining personal projects involving agency in the making of and finding balances within multifaceted selves.
The angle of the analysis of all four texts zooms on the inner and social battles associated with the fashioning or reinventing eclectic selves. Here, we find ourselves in the domain of parental power—and more specifically dyadic relations like mother-son or father-daughter—trauma and agency. This is a theoretical and cultural domain that requires deep probing.
While the analysis focuses on oppressive institutions, I wonder about the function of liberatory social spaces in the making and performance of queer subjectivity. Where, specifically, do subjects opt to make their sexuality public, and what considerations play out in their decision? In Annie Liontas’s novel Let Me Explain You, for example, the character’s choosing of the social space for her “coming out” is purposeful, taking into consideration not only the needs of the Self but feelings about beloved others. It will be productive then to examine this process of performing sexuality within the texts under investigation. What social spaces are available and how do characters negotiate prohibiting settings?
It would be productive too, to extend the discussion and include the public spaces in real life where the authors find allies and create inclusive communities.
At this extra-textual level, it is the publishing industry that offers the space for the authors to engage with complex issues, such as family violence, cruelty, mental health, and uncomfortable sexual desires, which, one must note, the Greek American public sphere largely hides. We can benefit from a cartography of queer subjectivity and its negotiations in the public sphere.
In this respect, interconnecting the factual with the fictional might produce valuable insights. To what communities and social relations do the characters and the narrativized selves participate, and what does this tell us about the social geographies of the Greek American Queer Narrative?
To add yet another dimension on the question of queering the Greek American public sphere: Toward its conclusion, the talk mentions the pioneering work of Leah Fygetakis. This raises the question about how the four texts in the talk relate to the insights and questions posed by pioneers in the field of Greek American sexuality. In her essay “Leah with an “H” or How I am Jewish, But Not Really” (4) Fygetakis shares her longing for a US Greek lesbian community, which was not at the time available to her. She finds a sense of partial belonging in a community based on sexuality but not ethnicity.
In the context of second-wave feminism, Constance Callinicos participates in an intercultural and sexuality diverse gathering of women who subvert in private traditional gendered dictates in folk dancing. If the North American “politics of gay and lesbian liberation hinge on strategies of queer visibility” (5), it seems to me necessary to probe the question of “queering the Greek American Narrative” in connection to practices negotiating visibility in particular pasts. Where was the narrative articulated in the 1970s and in the 1990s? Where is it performed now? Have there been any changes in the power relations and institutional realities that mediate it? In other words, the diasporic narrative calls for historicization.
The corpus of the four texts in today’s talk renders queer subjectivities visible. What kind of cultural and political work does this visibility perform? From my perspective, this visibility interrogates the grand ethnic narrative of family cohesion and success. It demonstrates families failing their non-normative children; depression and violence lurk behind the veneer of the model Greek ethnicity. In naming these processes, the texts produce knowledge confronting the truth of foundational Greek American narratives. They expose the harm that revered institutions do by hiding or demonizing situations that cause individuals to bleed. If queering a narrative in the broadest sense means resisting essentialism (6), and if, indeed, it means identifying practices within a group that the group denies or rejects, then this corpus queers the ethnic or diasporic narrative.
But this is my reading. I would like to hear more from Dr. Patrona about what she calls “Greek American Queer Narrative,” the kind of political work it performs.
The focus on queer subjectivities produces hidden or suppressed truths. We may wish to think deeper about the politics of alternative truths. I have in mind the specificity of interventions that particular genres enable. Autobiography, for instance, produces knowledge that can be utilized as evidence to undermine grand ethnic narratives.
Along these lines, can we think of how queer literary and popular culture could undermine normative Greek America? This inquiry will benefit by exploring the work of authors with different politics of queerness offering different strategies of intervention. We could probe the broader transnational field: the fiction of Christos Tsiolkas, for example and his politics; the films of Anna Kokkinos; Zack Stratis’ film Could Be Worse! The poetry of Olga Broumas. I wonder about the place of David Sedaris in this conversation. What do we make of Gus Constantellis’s bold––“on your face”––Greek Brooklyn queer comedy?
This returns us to the question of a queer public sphere. It is important to bring these Greek Australian, Greek American, Greek, and other texts into conversation to explore the range of context-specific strategies authors use to undermine diasporic normalizations. There is scholarship comparing Greek and Greek Australian queer films (7). The comparative approach will hopefully attract scholars globally, empowering diasporic queer studies.
I now turn my attention to theory. Dr. Patrona’s talk enters a field of knowledge notable for its political and theoretical sophistication. Terms such as “queer,” “lesbian,” “gay,” “homosexual,” “identity,” are not self-evident categories. They are debated rigorously, producing a nuanced understanding of the work these categories perform. This theoretical field has a genealogy and is vastly complex.
To identify some contours of this terrain: Queerness is a theoretical and political project deconstructing binaries and resisting essentialisms. It recognizes identities as fluid and unstable. A thread in this conversation, therefore, rejects identity-based renderings of sexuality as a practice reproducing essentialism. Some theorists find the term “queer” problematic for their projects. They use expansive definitions of the term “lesbian” to foreground the historical specificity of lesbians and lesbian culture, noting that this specificity is not acknowledged “by the categories ‘queer’ and ‘gay.’” Hence the uneasiness about lesbian specificity being obscured by “supposedly ‘gender neutral’ categories like ‘queer’” (8). Still, individuals involved in same-sex love in Greece reject the category “lesbian.” What is more, since the 1990s, we have witnessed a theoretical and cultural “shift from gay to queer” (9). Scholars theorize queerness as an embodied experience.
The talk today seems to employ the terms queer, lesbian, and gay interchangeably. Greek American analysis of queer material needs to situate it in relation to the academic field “queer studies.”
In closing, I wish to refer to another domain the talk enters. Dr. Patrona’s presentation refers to it as “ethnic,” though toward the conclusion, there is mention of a “transnational angle.” The reference to transnationalism inevitably introduces the domain “diaspora” in connection to queerness.
I introduce the term “diaspora” purposefully, because of the analytical possibilities it offers. Diaspora connotes geographic and cultural mobilities, inviting us to explore negotiations of sexuality in connection to time and place. There is rich scholarship on the intersections of queer and diaspora studies, guiding this key question: what is at stake in queering diaspora? Here, in the interest of time, I will only mention that interconnecting sexuality with histories of mobilities raises questions of how ideas of sexuality travel, and how they are shaped via border-crossing; how sexual non-normativity generates desires to emigrate, and how material and symbolic conditions at the new home shape articulations of sexuality in specific spaces. Based on my reading of Joanna Eleftheriou and Annie Liontas’s work, their accounts invite this kind of inquiry. One negotiates non-normativity differently in a village in Crete and Philadelphia, Cyprus and New York City.
I will stop here. I thank you once again for providing me with the opportunity to think about these issues and for participating. I’m looking forward to the conversation. Thank you.
February 28, 2024
Notes
1. Kelly Ann McWilliam, Girl Meets Girl: Lesbian Romantic Comedies and the Public Sphere. PhD Dissertation. University of Queensland, Australia, 2006).
2. The four texts are, Annie Liontas’s Let Me Explain You (2015), Angelo Surmelis’s young adult novel The Dangerous Art of Blending In (2018), Dean Kostos’s memoir The Boy Who Listened to Paintings (2019) and Joanna Eleftheriou’s This Way Back (2020).
3. Mandy Treagus, “Queering the Mainstream: The Slap and ‘Middle’ Australia.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 12.3 (2012), 1.
4. Leah Fygetakis M., “Leah with an ‘H’ or How I am Jewish, But Not Really. Women & Therapy 33, 3–4 (2010): 418–24.
4. Leah Fygetakis M., “Leah with an ‘H’ or How I am Jewish, But Not Really. Women & Therapy 33, 3–4 (2010): 418–24.
5. Meg Wesling, “why queer diaspora?” Feminist Review 90 (2008), 40.
6. Mandy Treagus, “Queering the Mainstream,” 2.
6. Mandy Treagus, “Queering the Mainstream,” 2.
7. Dimitris Papanikolaou, “New Queer Greece: Thinking Identity through Constantine Giannaris’s From the Edge of the City and Anna Kokkinos’s Head On.” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 6.3 (2008): 183–96.
8. Kelly Ann McWilliam, Girl Meets Girl, 14.
9. Dimitris Papanikolaou, “New Queer Greece,” 183.
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