‘Aunt Stamatina’ shakes things up on the small screen

Giouli Tsagaraki plays Aunt Stamatina successful Giorgos Kapoutzidis’ caller television series, ‘Serres.’

“Your sister is an intersex woman.” Dumbstruck by the news, Lefteris feels small fireworks going disconnected successful his encephalon each clip the doc repeats the phrase. Sitting crossed from him, his sister Stamatina is silent. She’d complained of abdominal symptom and they’re visiting the doc due to the fact that it whitethorn beryllium something serious, arsenic it was with their mother.

The doc goes connected to calmly explicate what this means, successful arsenic overmuch item arsenic possible, but without overwhelming her diligent and her brother. “She was calved intersex, but underwent surgery arsenic a babe during which her parents – together with the doc – decided what her enactment would be. In fact, she has nary reproductive organs astatine all. She was raised arsenic a girl, but she doesn’t person the interior anatomy typically recovered successful females. Her anatomy is neither distinctly pistillate nor distinctly antheral – it is that of an intersex person. Unfortunately, nary 1 ever told her the truth.”

Lefteris faintly remembers a household speech backmost when helium was a young lad astir such an operation, arsenic helium tried to get his caput astir the news. When helium tells the two women what helium remembers, the doc answers: “Unfortunately, society – with the complicity of the aesculapian establishment, of people – has not treated these individuals fairly. It tried to unit them into its ain molds with violent intervention, some connected their physiology and successful their psychology. But that has started to alteration successful caller years.”

This country is successful the eighth occurrence of the 2nd rhythm of a caller television bid by fashionable actor, presenter and screenwriter Giorgos Kapoutzidis, “Serres,” which was screened a fewer days agone – and blew up the Greek internet. It was the archetypal clip that an intersex quality had featured successful such a salient relation successful a Greek television accumulation and, what’s more, successful a prime-time slot.

“I think Greek television is progressively gaining clarity,” Liza Tsaliki, a prof of authorities and accusation society and seat of the Department of Communication & Media Studies astatine Athens University, tells Kathimerini. “It is gradually shedding the stereotypical and caricatured portrayals of queer individuality that used to look successful older Greek comedies.”

She says that there is an evident displacement distant from such portrayals toward greater acceptance, toward “an attack that views individuality arsenic adjacent to each others – something that should beryllium visible, not hidden oregon deconstructed, but presented arsenic a earthy quality condition.”

Greek TV has travel a agelong way successful however it represents the LGBTQI+ assemblage since its archetypal timid steps toward inclusion. Christoforos Papakaliatis’ bid “Close Your Eyes” made past successful 2003 with the archetypal cheery buss connected the small screen, a country that really earned the broadcaster a good from the National Council for Radio and Television (ESR). Following that breakthrough, the depiction of characters with antithetic sex identities and intersexual orientations became a batch much natural, with bid such arsenic “Ethniki Ellados,” “Maestro,” “Wild Bees” and “A Night to Remember” being conscionable a fewer that enhanced the trend.

“The information that there are rather a fewer bid nowadays – and not conscionable comedies, but besides dramas and transgression dramas – incorporating queer individuality shows that we, too, are evolving,” notes Tsaliki. “A portion of our television scenery is aligning with planetary practice, as, indeed, should beryllium the case.”