«Et io ne vidi uno in Napoli». Orientalismo e processi di patrimonializzazione dei femminielli napoletani

In Naples, as in several other cities of the Campania region (Italy), the word femminiello/femminella “traditionally” refers to effeminate men who behave and act as women. In the last decade femminielli/femminelle were the subject of a true heritagization process, intended to enhace and capitalize their “ancient identity”, now considered on the verge of extinction. Nonetheless, still today, people who self-identify as femminiello/femminella embody an “old-fashioned way” ideal of femininity, sometimes claiming the specificity of their local identity, and distancing themselves from the LGBTQI+ representations and identities. Based on the data collected during a long term fieldwork in Campania, this essay focuses on the processes of production, reproduction and manipulation of the femminielli/femminelle’ identities. More specifically by crossing literature and field notes, I will propose an analysis of the interactions between an orientalist and colonial imaginary that “produces” the femminiello/femminella as otherness (southern) and the reversal that occurs with the distinctive claim of gender experiences embodied by people who still identify as femminielli/femminelle. How do these imaginaries interact? And what implicit stereotypes lurk in such representations?

Achille tra le rose (negli anni di Napoleone). Femminilizzazione del guerriero nella Penthesilea di Heinrich von Kleist

The hypothesis I advance in this article is that the character of Achilles in Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea embodies the Object of desire of the female protagonist, the queen of the Amazons. By the word “Object”, I mean the interiorised and imaginary representation Penthesilea phantasises within herself about an otherwise unknown “thing” desired which finally takes the feminine features of a tender and harmless boy wearing crowns and garlands of roses, an “Achilles among the roses”, as it were – the word “rose” being both the anagram of “eros” and the emblem of the female sex. In the course of the analysis, I argue that this “mirage” of Penthesilea, the “thing desired”, is the projection of the “Thing itself”, maternal love, which, being unredeemedly lost to her, turns into a persecutory ghost. My understanding of von Kleist’s Penthesilea is not rooted in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, but both in the historical and political context in which the tragedy of the queen of the Amazon was conceived and in the transcendental and idealistic philosophy of the Subject.

«Come muovermi nel mio corpo da uomo»: il corpo maschile travestito nel teatro inglese, dai ragazzi attori a Caryl Churchill

Among the many traditions of cross-dressing in performing practices, English Renaissance theatre plays a central symbolic role, especially considering the Shakespearean canon; however, only through the disruptive reading of gender and queer studies Shakespeare’s theatre has been studied as a transvestite theatre in which all female parts were played by boy actors. This article intends to show how this transvestite body opens a diachronic perspective on those theatrical practices of the second half of the twentieth century that rediscover the Elizabethan stage as a locus of artifice. Renaissance and twentieth-century theatre thus share the transvestite male body, not following a linear dynamic of model and imitation, but in a much more complex interweaving of echoes and returns. Through an analysis of two works by the playwright Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine (1979) and A Mouthful of Birds (1986), the essay explores the transvestite male body as a place of dialogue between the Shakespearean and the contemporary scene, which share effeminacy -here understood as the staging of femininity on a male body- as a detonator for a wider crisis of binary categories.

Editoriale

.

Il terzo genere? Koṭhī, hijṛa, kinnar e donne trans alla ricerca di cittadinanza nell’India contemporanea

Hijṛā communities from South Asia are often taken as an example of social acknowledgment of transgender in a ‘traditional’ context. Nevertheless, this exoticizing representation erases all distinctions among hijṛā, kinnar, koṭhī, third gender persons, transmen and transwomen, and other individuals whose gender identity does not conform to the man/woman binary. In this article, I will introduce the debate about identity construction of people that complicate the binary gender identity, within the framework of citizenship claims and homonationalism.

«Sei troppo effemminato. / Di femmina son nato». Infrazione di codici e fluidità di genere in alcuni libretti d’opera del Seicento veneziano

The fear that man, subjected to practices considered emasculating, could “regress” to the female state was culturally central in the early modern definition of the man-woman polarity. In this context, effeminacy was used as a stigma against practices to be banned or controlled and was among the main accusations raised by the religious controversy against the emerging professional theatre. Through the close reading of some librettos produced in Venice between 1641 and 1668, the essay aims to show how the authors appropriated some tòpoi of the antitheatrical controversy, building an artistic acrobatics in which love was seen as a “disease” capable of removing the hero’s virility and was observed within a practice (theatre, and especially opera) which was itself considered effeminate and emasculating. The essay revolves around a progressive intensification of ambiguities, transvestitisms and allusions, showing how the librettists of Venetian opera also attempted an investigation of gender codes at the textual level and pushed themselves to the limit beyond which the mechanism of censorship inevitably triggered.

Ritratto dell’artista da effeminato. Agatone e Zambinella

The essay starts from the figure of the poet-gynnis, Agatone, with whom Aristophanes opens the Thesmophoriazusae’s seemingly conventional plot, that heightened the men/women historically binary opposition in the Athenian polis. The elusive and metamorphic figure of the effeminate-asexual poet, who explicitly recalls an Aeschilean representation of Dionysus, the god of the theatre, strongly confirms the familiarity of Aristophanes with the Orphic-Dionysian sphere also attested in his masterpiece The Birds and in Plato’s Symposium. Aristophanes’ attention for the reasons of this line of thought, an alternative to the dominant thought in the city, has obvious implications of political and social criticism towards the historically established order and, at the same time, poses the topic of theatre and poetry. The gynnis is a poet’s ambiguous portrait and, in this particular comedy, it also questions the reasons and working of dramatization between mimesis and fantastic deformation.

Paggi, coppieri e imberbi: gli effeminati nella cultura persiana

Mentioned in the Qur’an and ḥadīṯs, described by Muslim treaties of medicine, and celebrated in the literature and visual arts, effeminates have a central place in Persianate culture, as indicated by the fact that Persian language has a rich vocabulary to define them. Poetry also abounds of aesthetic and erotic descriptions that turn effeminates into objects of desire, at time sublimating them with mystic fervour, at other times celebrating them more prosaically and physically. Through a diachronic approach, the essay places these figures in a theoretical, socio-cultural and artistic-literary perspective.