Fantasies of the Feminine in Contemporary Greek Women Poets

The paper discusses the work of nine contemporary Greek women poets – Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Olga Broumas, Kiki Dimoula, Zoe Karelli, Maria Laina, Jenny Mastoraki, Pavlina Pamboudi, Athina Papadaki, and Andia Frantzi-within a broad feminist context as presented through French theorists like Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous and also American poet-critics, mainly Adrienne Rich. It explores the way in which women poets writing in Greece today receive and react to the basic issues raised by feminist thinking, such as the muteness and double bind imposed on women authors by patriarchy, the self-conception and self-expression of the woman/creator, the relation to the (misogynistic) myths and tales of tradition, the need to articulate the feminine fantasies and perception of the world. Above all, the paper traces the attempt to reject stereotypes, to retrieve women's experience of history through the revisionary telling of women's stories, and to bring the female Imaginary into the male Symbolic, standing (perilously) on the edge of a linguistic system that has systematically ignored them