Narrating the Colonial Body Masculine Performance and Migrant Otherness in Contemporary Greek Fiction: The Drunken Woman (2005) by Sotiria Stavrakopoulou

Abstract

This paper focuses on Sotiria Stavrakopoulou's novel Drunken Woman, examining the function of the Albanian immigrant woman’s body as a colonial territory within a mixed marriage narrated by a first-person narrator (the husband). Through a feminist and postcolonial reading, the narrative is analysed as a discourse of domination, in which the Greek husband performs his masculinity through the cultural, gendered, and ethnic subordination of his wife. The study identifies colonial practices of appropriation and the disciplining of the female body and focuses on the shifts in power that ultimately lead to the exclusion of the narrator himself. Stavrakopoulou, through her focus on the male narrator, highlights not only the strategies of oppression but also the dynamics of emancipation of the “foreign woman”, who is transformed from an object of desire and colonial violence into an active subject. Structured along the axes of "Integration" and "Exclusion", the novel functions as an ironic subversion of the ideology of ethnic and gender superiority, proposing a critical intersection in the way contemporary Greek prose represents immigrant otherness.