Strella: Of Queer Utopias

Abstract

Chapter 4 reads Panos Koutras’s Strella/A Woman’s Way (2009) as an exemplary cinematic case of the ‘aesthetic queer utopias’ modeled by José Esteban-Muñoz, which invites the viewer to reframe and reimagine traditional ideologies and representations of family and the Greek national space. In the film’s unconventional spatial contradistinction between the village and the capital city—a contradistinction that is highlighted as physical, representational and ideological—the village emerges as a hostile and haunting place for the queer subject, whereas the queer marginal spaces of the capital appear as affectively ambivalent, both excessive and productive. Through this reversal of the canonical representational antithesis between the village and the capital, the film opens up an aesthetic space for queer fantasizing beyond the here-and-now and towards a better collective future.