Papers by julia heim
Open Screens, 2025
This article explores representations of subjecthood in Netflix's 2018 Italian teen drama Baby th... more This article explores representations of subjecthood in Netflix's 2018 Italian teen drama Baby through a detailed investigation into the ways that the multiple spaces of an elite private high school in Rome's upper class Parioli neighborhood control and are controlled by the students who occupy them. The three-season series, a fictionalized version of a real-life Italian underage prostitution ring in Rome, explores all facets of the teenage lives of its characters, but it is through the space of the school, the hallways, the classrooms, the locker rooms, and the bathrooms, that we get to understand how social regulation works on and against those who depend on its structures. Using cultural geography and queer theory, this analysis explores how the representation of these students in these spaces ultimately reveals the inability of normative structures to understand or educate these students in a way that meets their needs.
Queering Italian Media, 2020
Translators’ Epilogue
BRILL eBooks, Nov 17, 2022
Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 2020
This article analyses the narrative depictions of LGBTQ minorities in contemporary Italian transn... more This article analyses the narrative depictions of LGBTQ minorities in contemporary Italian transnational television. To understand the sociocultural repercussions of these representations I first contextualize them by exploring current cultural theories behind trends in production and acquisition practices. I argue that by conforming to 'univer-salized' format and audience standards individual nations achieve transnational visibility. In turn, this universalization contributes to the transnational validation of the narrative discourses within these television programmes. As such, the depic-tions of LGBTQ characters on the shows Suburra, Gomorrah, Baby and SKAM Italia legitimize a certain level of sexual and gender variance while simultaneously endorsing acts of discrimination against those within these minority categories.
Diversity in Italian Studies, 2019
LGBTQIA+ students may regularly experience verbal or physical harassment, threats, and misgenderi... more LGBTQIA+ students may regularly experience verbal or physical harassment, threats, and misgenderings in all aspects of their lives, be it at home, at school, or in public. At school specifically, as the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) reports, the result is often absenteeism, higher dropout rates, mental health issues, and academic underachievement (HRC 2018). There are also more subtle issues of microaggressions and invisibilities that occur whose consequences are much more commonly swept under the rug. Our words and behaviors can significantly impact the experience these students have. As Italian language, literature, and culture instructors, we may often neglect to consider LGBTQIA+ inclusivity, labeling it as outside the framework of our course content. The normativity embedded in our texts and the shape of our pedagogical materials, however, are both isolating to our LGBTQIA+ students and ignore, and thus erase, LGBTQIA+ Italian literature, history, and culture, pushing it outside the bounds of "legitimate" disciplinary study. In this essay we discuss some of the reasons for this type of pedagogical formation and some of the specific tools for building intentionally inclusive learning spaces.
It Is Messy. And It Is Mediated
The Italianist
Gender/Sexuality/Italy, 2021
Italian Studies, 2019
This article investigates the multifaceted theoretical orientations and political concerns of, an... more This article investigates the multifaceted theoretical orientations and political concerns of, and the urgent need for, queer Italian studies. Critically reflecting on the current social, cultural, political, and economic positions of LGBTQIA+ identified individuals and other minoritised people in Italy, the article maps out diverse but convergent ways of understanding the urgent public and institutional need for interdisciplinary approaches to embodied and theoretical Italian queerness, and the potential impact of this research, activism, and pedagogy. After an exploration into the traces that link queer Italian studies to historical research and feminist history and an elaboration of what a queer Italian pedagogy looks like, this article urges us to look across marginalised publics, so that by using these variegated geopolitical and theoretical positions, languages and praxes, those both inside and outside academia can collectively inform and further the discipline of queer Italian studies.
Vi scriviamo come persone che sono direttamente chiamate in causa dai modi in cui la società ital... more Vi scriviamo come persone che sono direttamente chiamate in causa dai modi in cui la società italiana incoraggia e perpetua il razzismo, il patriarcato, la normodotazione, l'antagonismo trans e l'omofobia. Questa lettera nasce da un interesse condiviso per la creazione di un governo italiano più equo e non-oppressivo. Noi abbiamo dei legami molto diversi, e con vari livelli di stabilità con l'accademia britannica, americana ed italiana, ma la nostra attenzione nei confronti dell'Italia supera i confini di una riflessione meramente accademica. Noi abbiamo esperito in prima persona come la geopolitica e i limiti arbitrari quali i confini nazionali abbiano intensificato queste strutture oppressive, poiché noi siamo (stat*) trapiantat* da un luogo all'altro e abbiamo visto altr* (a volte forzatamente) trasferit*. Le nostre famiglie, i nostri colleghi e compagni sono anch'essi legati all'eredità e al futuro di un'Italia, un'Europa e un mondo più giusti e compassionevoli. Con questa lettera, vogliamo esprimere la nostra rabbia e le nostre paure; nel denunciare questi aspetti e i responsabili, vogliamo fare un passo verso i cambiamenti che noi, e coloro che ci sostengono, non solo desideriamo ma pretendiamo. Negli ultimi due anni, abbiamo diretto un network di ricerca sulle culture, teorie e politiche italiane queer sponsorizzato dall'Ahrc (Arts and Humanities Research Council). Nelle nostre attività più recenti (ovvero, workshop, convegni, discussioni e pubblicazioni), è diventato evidente che l'Italia resta un ambiente estremamente ostile per tutte le persone che sono accusate di trasgredire un insieme ristretto di norme socioculturali. Siamo sgoment* di fronte al fatto che tali norme problematicamente razziste e conservatrici continuino a persistere e che, parafrasando Dr Martin Luther King Jr, nonostante il fatto che il lungo arco dell'universo morale tenda verso la giustizia, il governo italiano – insieme a gran parte del mondo occidentale – sembra abrasivamente tornare indietro rispetto all'inevitabilità del nostro momento contemporaneo. Speriamo che le organizzazioni dal basso continuino a manifestare per un futuro equo contro i regimi autoritari di odio ed oppressione. Le recenti elezioni hanno visto l'ascesa al potere di individui le cui idee su sessualità, razza e identità di genere sono violentemente, e spesso fatalmente, discriminatorie. Le loro idee hanno già condotto ad incidenti estremamente seri, e non suscitano (quasi) nessuna protesta da parte dello stato, sebbene vi siano molte voci dissenzienti sui social media e da parte del pubblico politicamente consapevole. Questa situazione è estremamente pericolosa.
Books by julia heim
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Queering Italian Media, 2020
Queering Italian Media analyzes and offers queer readings of LGBTQIA+ representation in Italian m... more Queering Italian Media analyzes and offers queer readings of LGBTQIA+ representation in Italian media. The contributors apply various understandings of "queer" and "media" as they discuss the relationship between the political and social lives of queer populations in Italy and investigate their representations in film, news media, television, social media, and viewer-generated media sites. Queering Italian Media examines queer positionality, challenges notions of Italianness as it relates to and is reflected in media, and queers understandings of viewer engagement and participation in media consumption and production.
Contemporary Italian television, like many national televisions, has entered a period in which th... more Contemporary Italian television, like many national televisions, has entered a period in which the relationships the producers and consumers of televisual content are increasingly indistinguishable. In this age of media convergence the new participants of this medium work across platforms to actively engage, consume, create, and recreate both televisual content and our understanding of the medium. These new relationships require a new understanding of the semiotic and discursive changes taking place in television so that we may reconceptualize the contemporary interplay between media and society. This dissertation maps out a new understanding of the televisual economy through an elaboration of the dynamics between the four main "bodies" of television, understood as: the consumed televisual body; the produced televisual body; the community bodies of production and consumption; and the individual bodies of production and consumption. These bodies dismantle traditional understanding of identity coherence and must be taken as unstable assembled moments of connection whose mercurial forms depend on technology and on their proximity to the other televisual bodies at play. The compositions of these bodies, which all shape and are shaped by one another, embody queerness as they v reflect the queer theories of assemblage (Puar), temporality (Edelman, Halberstam, and Dinshaw), phenomenology (Ahmed), and utopia (Muñoz). Throughout this dissertation, Italian television is used as a steppingstone, as a gateway through which we may understand the intersections of national and global television in this queer moment of media convergence. In sharp contrast, investigations of contemporary representations of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) people on Italian national television lie in direct opposition to the queerness embodied by the contemporary structures of the medium. By using Stuart Hall's theory that identity is formed through representation (see Questions of Cultural Identity), we may understand that the depictions of LGBT people on Italian television shape the ways these groups are understood by and positioned within society, and the effects and consequences of their positionality. The analyses of LGBT people on family fiction programing produced by mainstream (satellite, private, and public) Italian television between 2007 and 2017 reveal the problematics of the contemporary trend of "normalizing" these minorities. Depictions of LGBT characters repeatedly mirror and thus naturalize the desire for monogamous procreative futurity. The necessary consequence of this is the erasure of difference both between LGBT people and heterosexuals and gender conforming individuals, and between people within these Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual (LGBTQIA) communities. The invisibilities of LGBTQIA intimacies, desires, alternative modes of living, and communities on Italian television only allow for a partial integration of these people in the larger Italian society. Mainstream LGBT depictions frame these communities as marginalized while necessarily reinforcing the naturalness of their homonormative presentation. If we, however, expand
Book Reviews by julia heim
Ellen Nerenberg's book Murder Made in Italy places three relatively recent and notorious murders ... more Ellen Nerenberg's book Murder Made in Italy places three relatively recent and notorious murders within the broader framework of an Italian society enmeshed in, and susceptible to an all-encompassing local and global media culture. The first chapter of each section deals with an actual crime or series of crimes: the serial murders of the "Monster of Florence" between 1974 and 1985; the double homicide of Susy Cassini and Gianluca De Nardo in Novi Ligure by Erika
The idea for Barbara Maio's Osservatorio TV began in 2012. The goal of her yearly project, as she... more The idea for Barbara Maio's Osservatorio TV began in 2012. The goal of her yearly project, as she shares on the website, is for scholars to contribute papers that deal with contemporary television series and serials that have yet to garner much critical attention. The second edition of Osservatorio TV, and the one being reviewed here, went live in October 2014, under the Creative Commons Public License, offering Italian speakers critical insight into recent television programmes. Maio's decision to put the project online and make it free of charge is quite in keeping with a new trend in television scholarship, which authors like Jason Mittell had begun to do shortly before her (Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling 2013). Even more relevant, and a point that is reflected in many of the contributions compiled in
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Papers by julia heim
Books by julia heim
Book Reviews by julia heim