French, Italian, and Classical Studies

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. I then move on to discuss a performativity that is particular to Mieli's cultural production: to dare, elaborating on the performative structure of Mieli's insistence that to dare is also to give of oneself. I conclude by reflecting on Mieli's figuring of the actor as masochist. For Mieli, masochism makes it possible to dissolve the individual self in favor of a liberated communal self, a subjective process that is enabled through daring acts.

Mario Mieli (1952-1983) is a major intellectual figure of the 1970s Italian gay liberation movement whose work has become of interest to activists and cultural critics both in Italy and in anglophone scholarship in recent years. This article gives a general introduction to some of the main tenets of Mieli's theoretical claims (based on his integration of psychoanalysis and Marxism) alongside historical and biographical information pertaining to his militancy.

"Petrolio" was Pasolini’s final written work; left incomplete at the author’s death in 1975, it was not published until 1992. This article begins by considering Petrolio’s immediate public and critical reception, which heavily focused on the pathological sexual subject matter as linked to Pasolini’s impending death and a sign of the work’s low literary merit. This essay rejects those early readings that characterize the novel as sexually pathological and joins the conversation opened by queer investigations of form and politics in Pasolini. It argues that Pasolini suffuses sexual encounter with affective language, and that such language dramatizes the subjective process of the novel’s characters by conflating grammar, subjectivity, and history. The first section develops a reading of affective language as linked to sexual encounter in the novel. The second demonstrates that, through such affective language, Pasolini refashions his classic topos of the corpo popolare as schizophrenic body, an emptied or voided-out corporeal form. The final section lingers on questions of indeterminacy and narrative incompleteness, reading the novel’s expressive form as a reflection of the problem of historical transformation (which is also the problem of subjective transformation)—and more pointedly the historicity of what Pasolini refers to as Italy’s “anthropological mutation.”

The Sexual/Political engages with contemporary political issues in sexuality through a survey of modern philosophy, psychoanalytic thought, 20th- century political theory, and more recent queer philosophies. The book investigates how the sexual has perturbed philosophical, political, and psychoanalytic thought and how this has fed into discrimination against the LGBTQI community. It analyses the social stigmas applied to public and private sexual acts and the psychopolitical processes leading to the prevalence of neo-fascist populism in Italy and the world. Tracing the history of sexuality through Freud, Marx, Fanon, and Foucault, among many others, Bernini considers why the sexual has always been an exceptionally difficult object to consider in political theory.

In this paper, the episode of Ida’s rape in Elsa Morante’s La Storia is read as the intersection of three asymmetrical and intertwined conflicts – social, sexual, and racial – that permeates the entire novel. Ida’s fear and shame are inherited from her mother’s obsession with the racial laws and are inextricably linked to the disgust that knots Jewishness and nakedness. Ida’s emotional history shows that the power relations between her and Gunther pre-exist their encounter and is pre-determined by gender, class, and race. I argue that the sets of emotions the two characters experience in the scene under scrutiny depend on such hierarchy. While Ida is petrified by fear, Gunther wavers between the desire for love and anger, which in this scene appears as a one-sided emotion entailing an asymmetrical power, triggered by what he perceives as an offence from a subject that he considers inferior.

This paper analyzes Elena Ferrante’s I giorni dell’abbandono (2002) as an infernal journey: the protagonist Olga moves from the dependency and timidity of her role as wife and mother to a position that Ferrante herself calls sorveglianza, i.e., vigilance. Arguably, this word is a gendered term in Ferrante. There exists a masculine—repressive—vigilance and a sorveglianza that is made of the desire to be awake and aware. In order to become vigilant, Olga needs to reach the bottom of abandonment before starting her voyage back. The fall and difficult ascent toward a regenerated self is not new in the Western literary canon, but this tradition denies a final regeneration to the figure of the abandoned woman. My analysis of the imagery and the language of the novel highlights the influence from Dante’s Commedia, especially from Inferno, on Ferrante’s novel. I also seek, as a second goal, to consider the question of atonement and salvation in Ferrante by addressing the absence of a Virgil-like figure in her novel. Besides textual echoes of Dante’s Commedia on several levels (imagery, emotions, atmosphere, and lexicon) the most compelling parallel concerns the authoritative transformations achieved by Dante and Ferrante. Both poet and writer invent a “new “literature” based on the profound reworking of inherited models.

12 I morti della seconda guerra mondiale furono circa 48 milioni, la metà dei quali erano civili. La nazione che ebbe più perdite fu la Russia. Per le cifre cfr. il sito internet www.warchronicle.com/numbers/WWII/deaths.htm. 13 PIERRE SORLIN, "Children as war victims in postwar European cinema", in JAY WINTER, EMMANUEL SIVAN (eds.

Drawing from affect theory, philosophy, ecocriticism, and trauma studies, this article proposes an original interpretation of the extended metaphor of the displaced Asian bird in Elsa Morante’s La Storia. This powerful yet unexplored image directly links Ida’s traumatic experience of the rape with the historical persecution of the Jews: the bird represents a terror that Ida directly inherits from her mother Nora as postmemory. Moreover, I argue that the image foregrounds the “pathos of migration” as a leitmotiv of the novel, while casting a postcolonial and ecocritical gaze upon history. The Asian bird’s experience of place and displacement foreshadows reflections on the emotional interconnections between humans, animals and places that in Morante’s time were still at the embryonic level.