The Greek post-#MeToo era’s staging of diva citizenship in Milky Way, by Vassilis Kekatos

Abstract

Vassilis Kekatos’s melodrama series Milky Way (2023) narrates the life of Maria, a pregnant teenager in a fictional Greek village, whose “Athenian dream” is to join Eurovision singer Eleni Foureira’s dance troupe. The figure of Foureira, prevailing in the current post-feminist framework, finally appears as a deus ex machina in a vision. Foureira herself developed an Athenian dream, countering a xenophobic context through exceptionality. The present paper explores how female subjectivity is formulated in the series, how Kekatos uses the staging of the diva to address female gendering and alternative futures for teenage pregnancy, and what implications the series has in a post-#MeToo Greek context. Specifically, it encompasses Foureira’s staging within the framework of what Lauren Berlant (1997) has called “Diva Citizenship”. The main contribution lies in the analysis of how adolescent role models must be filtered through the complex contradictions and challenges inherent in postfeminist settings.