Queer Italian Cultures. Themed Section Editorial.

Julia Heim, Charlotte Ross, SA Smythe August 31, 2019 Issue: g/s/i 6 (2019) Category: Editorials, Themed Section

by Julia Heim, Charlotte Ross, SA Smythe

The editorial includes the Guest Editors’ introductions to their respective areas. Julia Heim, Charlotte Ross, and SA Smythe offer a brief critical contextualization of current and ongoing sociopolitical issues undergirding the question of LGBTQIA+ rights in Italy. They reflect on anti-queer/anti-LGBT discrimination within academia, on intersectional solidarity and activism, and on the developing field of “Queer Italian Studies.” The editorial also provides a summary of the articles contained in the volume.

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1.Queer, Frocia, Femminiellə, Ricchione et al. – Localizing “Queer” in the Italian Context

Eva Nossem August 31, 2019 Issue: g/s/i 6 (2019) Category: Themed Section

by Eva Nossem

This paper aims at examining the reception, (g)localization, and also (re)creation of different forms of “queer” in the Italian context. First, I conduct a semasiological analysis of the diachronic semantic and connotative development of the English-turned-global “queer” in order to provide a detailed insight into its palimpsestic meaning. The offensive qualities of the slur, I argue, provide the aggressive power required for self-definition in queer activism. In a next step,

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2.Mario Mieli, ovvero il maestro masochista: Performative Elements of a Perverse Militancy

Matthew Zundel August 31, 2019 Issue: g/s/i 6 (2019) Category: Themed Section

by Matthew Zundel

This essay offers a reading of Mario Mieli’s militant political project through the theoretical lens of performativity. Performativity, suspended between, and fully incorporating both the linguistic and the theatrical, courses through Mieli’s cultural production. I begin with a discussion of the role of the travestito within the context of Mieli’s involvement in the emergence of gay theater in Italy in the late 1970s and its necessarily political valences.

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3.A View on Queer and Feminism in Italy: Conflicts and Alliances

Alberica Bazzoni August 31, 2019 Issue: g/s/i 6 (2019) Category: Themed Section

by Alberica Bazzoni

This article explores some aspects of the relationship between feminism and queer in Italy today. There are significant areas where these two discursive and political paradigms have established and continue to establish productive, mutually reinforcing conversations and alliances. In other contexts, however, a sheer tension has emerged between the two, rooted in diverging views of the pivotal notion of “sexual difference.” The article sets out to investigate and compare queer and feminist approaches to difference,

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4.Translating Spanish Transfeminist Activism into Italian. Performativity, DIY, and Affective Contaminations.

Michela Baldo August 31, 2019 Issue: g/s/i 6 (2019) Category: Themed Section

by Michela Baldo

This article examines the translations into Italian of four post-porn and transfeminist Spanish texts, written by the writers and performers Diana Torres and Itziar Ziga: Pornoterrorismo/Porn terrorism (2014), Fica Potens/ Powerful Cunt (2015), Vomitorium/Vomitorium (2017), and Diventare Cagna/Becoming a Bitch (2015). The texts were translated by a group of Italian transfeminist translators. The presentations of these translations, between the years 2014 and 2017,

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5.Fabio Mollo’s Il padre d’Italia /There is a Light: A Visual Journey through Queer Ecology, EcoMasculinity, and Fatherhood

Danila Cannamela August 31, 2019 Issue: g/s/i 6 (2019) Category: Themed Section

by Danila Cannamela

The movie Il padre d’Italia/ There is a Light (2017, dir. Fabio Mollo) tells the story of a road trip across Italy: Paolo and Mia, a gay man and a pregnant woman, meet by chance and travel from the north to the south. The Italian landscape becomes the setting of a narrative of displacement that challenges dominant gender-nature associations in contemporary Italy. The journey allows Mia to “move away” from her “natural” maternal role and Paolo to become the father of Mia’s daughter,

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6.Teenage “Somatechnics”: Classed, Gendered, and Racialised Subjectivities in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name and Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare

Samuele Grassi August 31, 2019 Issue: g/s/i 6 (2019) Category: Themed Section

by Samuele Grassi

In this paper I examine presences-absences and dis-allowed mobilities in neoliberal Italy through a comparative reading of two apparently unrelated films: Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name (2018) and Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare (Fire At Sea, 2016). My comparative approach is informed by new materialist feminist critiques, drawing primarily from queer feminist, post-colonial, and de-colonial thinkers whose work aims to dismantle the naturalisation of differences to make new worlds and unmake existing ones.

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7.Metastasio per trans

Egon Botteghi August 31, 2019 Issue: g/s/i 6 (2019) Category: Invited Perspectives

by Egon Botteghi

The “musicians” (euphemism used for the castrated singers) appear in Italy by the end of the sixteenth century, following a Papal Decree that forbade women to sing in church and consequently in theatres. Throughout the following three centuries, musicians ruled the European music scene, becoming one of the most important exported “goods” from Italy. Created by other men for artistic as well as political and devotional purposes, these men are described in the literature of the time as “chimeric beings,” halfway between a man and a woman,

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8.Valerie Solanas’s Trilogia SCUM: A feminist translation project of care. Interview/dialogue with Stefania Arcara and Deborah Ardilli.

Stefania Arcara, Deborah Ardilli, Michela Baldo August 31, 2019 Issue: g/s/i 6 (2019) Category: Invited Perspectives

by Stefania Arcara, Deborah Ardilli, Michela Baldo

This interview focuses on the recent publication of Trilogia SCUM (2017), the Italian translation and retranslation of the complete works by radical lesbian feminist Valerie Solanas (editors Stefania Arcara and Deborah Ardilli). Solanas’s publication is discussed as a feminist translation project of care: through the use of abundant paratextual material, and through the restoration of Solanas’s uncensored SCUM Manifesto (1967), Arcara and Ardilli have joined efforts in reconstituting the legitimacy of Solanas as a feminist writer,

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9.Feminism Makes History in Verona: The Response to the World Congress of Families

Alessandra Montalbano August 31, 2019 Issue: g/s/i 6 (2019) Category: Invited Perspectives, Videos

by Alessandra Montalbano

The last weekend of March 2019, Verona was at the center of media attention for having hosted the XIII World Congress of Families (WCF). However, the feminist response to this ultra-conservative and religious event became the true news. The transnational feminist movement Non Una Di Meno (NUDM) organized a three-day mobilization that included the biggest march in the history of Verona and had a strong impact on public opinion.

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