The Decline of the WASP and the Promotion of Ethnic Diversity in My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002)

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Film Science grade: 10 language: English abstract: This paper aims at exploring the filmic deployment of White and Greek ethnicity in specific contexts. The central questions discussed in this paper are: How are Whiteness and Greekness depicted in My Big Fat Greek Wedding? More importantly which essential message does the film convey? For this purpose the paper will first of all take a closer look at American ethnic relations from a historical perspective in order to establish important references to the following film analysis. In a second step the paper will plunge into the analysis of My Big Fat Greek Wedding as such. In this regard it initially explores how Greekness and Whiteness and their relation as a cultural clash are portrayed in the film. Subsequently it will examine how these two divergent worlds are connected by analyzing the two main characters Toula Portokalos and Ian Miller. Thereafter the result of connecting the White American and the Greek American culture is investigated by analyzing the wedding. Finally the paper concludes by summarizing the main findings and giving a brief outlook. It should however be mentioned that this paper solely examines how social structures of American ethnic relations are represented in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. To be more precise it exclusively refers to the filmic level and does not aim at generalizing the main findings concerning American society as a whole.