Not straight from Italy: Seeking anti-national killjoys in Italian Studies

Abstract

When, at a conference in my field, I am one of a handful of people whose research approach to Italian Studies is drawn from Queer Studies, I grapple with feelings of intellectual isolation. In those moments, the image that Pier Vittorio Tondelli (2006) used in opening Camere separate comes to mind. Leo, the novel’s queer protagonist, is on a plane above the Alps at sunset gazing at a view both beautiful and unsettling. Looking out of the airplane window, he can only make out the outline of the mountain chain, its distinct shape impressing upon him and capturing his imagination. Immersed as it is in the melancholic hue of the evening sky, the landscape looks to Leo like an abstract painting framed by the oval shape of the oblò. The “abisso cobalto” (Tondelli, 2006: 7) he is staring at feels cold and distant, yet somewhat comforting in its orderly aloofness. When the light suddenly switches on, Leo sees his own face superimposed on the landscape and the previous order becomes jumbled, confusing, uncanny even—as if the shape of the natural world could not assimilate the lines, vectors, lights, and shadows that form the outline of Leo’s queer self. Like other fields in the Modern Languages, Italian Studies has attempted to fit within its own disciplinary design the subjectivities—queer, trans, and non-binary (Amin, 2022) —that have animated Queer Studies since the seminal publication of Judith Butler’s (2006) Gender Trouble in 1990. Since the turn of the century, Queer Studies has moved towards an increasingly intersectional understanding of identity formation (Eng and Puar, 2020; Ferguson, 2003; Nash, 2019) that emphasizes the critique of normative familial, ethnic, racial, linguistic, and national communities (Boellstorff, 2005; Bond Stockton, 2009; Joseph, 2002; Puar, 2007; Stanley, 2021). Similarly, Italian Studies scholars have examined the representation of selves, bodies, and desires in both major and minor texts, showing that literature is a precious archive for the study of modern national identity and the place of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity in its making (Duncan, 2020; Polizzi, 2022; Welch, 2014). Personally, I have had something of an obsession for the relationship between literature, identities, and the feeling of belonging—or not belonging—for quite some time. One of my most vivid memories of my own formazione