Queer(ing) Gender in Italian Women's Writing: Maraini, Sapienza, Morante by Maria Morelli, Oxford and New York, Peter Lang, 2021, x + 306 pp., £46.35 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-78874-175-0

Abstract

This monograph demonstrates the happy marriage between queer theory and selected works of Dacia Maraini, Goliarda Sapienza, and Elsa Morante vis-á-vis the insights it affords into gender identity and its intersections with (biological) sex, the body, sexuality, and desire. Each serves the other well, with the texts illuminating the theory and the theory bringing to light new textual aspects or allowing more sophisticated and more complete interpretations of aspects examined in previous criticism. Morelli ’ s systematic application of queer theory as a literary critical tool shows how three women writers so diverse in life histories, ideas and ideologies (Morante and Sapienza were not supporters of feminism), writing styles, and chronology of output exhibit similar concerns and a similar approach to gender that depart from the pensiero della differenza sessuale , the Italian feminist philosophy that theorised an essential female difference originating in the body. This philosophy, which emerged alongside equality feminism during the 1970s and 1980s, namely when the selected works were written or published, has been used extensively to interpret post-1968 Italian women ’ s writing in the wake of Lazzaro-Weis ’ s 1993 pioneering study From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women ’ s Writings (1968 – 1990) . Morelli argues that, in creating characters who feel ill at ease in normative categories of gender and sexual identity and who are immersed in non-hegemonic multi-layered situations, dis/located spaces, and non-linear temporalities, Maraini, Sapienza, and Morante challenge the female-male binary and the imperatives of heterosexuality and reproduction that sustain patriarchal societies and subtend feminist thought of difference despite the latter ’ s aim to dismantle current concepts of femininity. In doing so, their works advocate more fluid and becoming subjectivities and ways of living that are akin