Spyridon Chairetis holds a DPhil in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Oxford. He has published on Greek (LGBTQI+) cinema and television, genre studies and auto-ethnography. He is the author of Greek Television Comedy: Popular Texts, Queer Readings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). His research interests revolve around media and sexuality studies, television fiction, gender anthropology and the relationship between media, culture and society. He is currently teaching television and media studies at Fårö Creative Learning in Athens, Greece.
In the 1960s, when television entered the majority of US households and became a ubiquitous cultural force, professor of communication George Gerbner developed cultivation theory to examine the medium’s influence on its viewers.[1] Within fictional worlds, he argued, ‘representation’ is vital, because it ‘signifies social existence; absence means symbolic annihilation’ (1972). Although cultivation theory has been criticised on both methodological and conceptual grounds (Hughes 1980; McQuail & Windahl 1993; Potter 1994), its engagement with the effects of representations paved the way for screen scholarship to examine how media in general have at different times and in different places favoured or erased particular topics or people from public consciousness. Indeed, research conducted within different disciplines has quantitatively and qualitatively described culture media products’ treatment of women and black, gay, lesbian and, relatively recently, transgender persons. ... More
Source: filmicon
With The Queer Greek Weird Wave, Marios Psaras, independent film scholar and filmmaker, contributes to an exponentially rich body of monographs and collective works that concentrate on visual culture, particularly on the field of film text analysis. Psaras’s text is part of the Palgrave Macmillan book series marketed under the title Representing Cultural Change and Crisis, which includes Davina Quinlivan’s Filming the Body: Trauma, Healing and Hopefulness (2015); Gwendolyn Audrey Foster’s Disruptive Feminisms: Raced, Gendered, and Classed Bodies in Film (2016); Kaitlynn Mendes and Kumarini Silva’s Feminist Erasures: Challenging Backlash Culture (2015); and Eleftheria Arapoglou, Yiorgos Kalogeras and Jopi Nyman’s Racial and Ethnic Identities in the Media (2016). The aforementioned projects are among many others that reveal a shift toward the study of cinema as both a product and an agent of change during times of economic precarity, social fragmentation, and instability. ... More