Bio

Spiros Chairetis recently defended his PhD/DPhil thesis, entitled ’Queering the Greek Television “Comedy”: Popular Texts, Dissident Readings’ (University of Oxford, UK), which explores the queer politics and potentialities of four popular television shows, initially made and seen in the 90s and 00s. He holds a BA in English literature, University of Athens and has studied Contemporary European Politics (University of Bath, UK & Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain) and Creative Writing (University of W. Macedonia, Greece) at Master’s level. Chairetis currently serves as editor of the first special issue exclusively dedicated to the study of Greek television fiction (Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies), while his general research interests and (upcoming) publications centre around the intersections of gender, sexuality, embodiment, and space in Greek media (cinema and television) and culture.

Project

My stay in Faber will hopefully give me the chance to take a short break from television research and modern Greek studies in order to explore other academic paths. Staying faithful to the promise of visual culture, my project (academic article) will investigate fan-based interventions in filmic texts. Using the globally popular trilogy The Lord of The Rings as a case study, I am interested in examining how the absence of gay and lesbian characters (and the concomitant presence of sexual innuendo) in the homosocial space of J. R. R. Tolkien’s textual universe provides the impetus for creative interventions, ones that allow actual audiences/members of fan groups with overlapping identities to contest such media images and articulate their dissident voice through their own queer fan-based projects (comics, videos, slash fiction).