National Team of Greece: Gender, Sports, and the Recession
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2421-454X/19233Keywords:
television fiction, MEGA Channel, Giorgos Kapoutzidis, recession, crisis, GreeceAbstract
National Team of Greece (2015) was a dramedy broadcast on Greek television revolving around a group of women’s efforts to establish the first Greek women’s curling team, amidst a number of personal challenges and societal obstacles, as much as against the backdrop of a country in deep political and economic crisis. Building on scholarly approaches to the ideological role of popular culture in turbulent times, this article examines the infiltration of recession themes in the content of television fiction, while centralizing a gendered reading of the narrative of the case at hand. Specifically, it provides a critical reading of the main narrative strategies of the programme – the female narrator, the female ensemble, and the metaphor of sports – in order to register the ways that the series enters into a dialogue with familiar gender tropes, such as questions of female agency, coping, and empowerment. Finally, it discusses the concept of empowerment and the ways it is accomplished or impeded within television in the (post)recessionary cultural moment, by focusing on aspects of the series’ production and reception.
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