Download or read book AntoloGaia written by Porpora Marcasciano and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-13 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this stirring memoir by a member of the first generation of LGBTQ+ activists in Italy, Porpora Marcasciano tells her story and shares the struggles and accomplishments of her fellow activists who achieved so much in the 1970s yet suffered devastating losses during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. AntoloGaia offers an insider’s look at the beginnings of the gay liberation movement in Italy and reveals how it was intimately intertwined with other forms of left-wing activism. At the same time, it powerfully conveys the queer joy of a young person from a small village first encountering the vibrant sexual minority communities of Naples, Bologna, and Rome. As Marcasciano starts to embrace her trans identity, she meets the famous anthropologist Pino Simonelli, who introduces her to Naples’s unique femminielli subculture and gives her the name Porporino, which she later shortens to Porpora. In keeping with this story of gender, sexual, and political discovery, AntoloGaia is the first piece of Italian life-writing to use gender-neutral and mixed-gender language.
Download or read book Italian Trans Geographies written by Danila Cannamela and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2023-10-01 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does the mapping of Italian culture change when it is charted from the perspective of gender-variant people? Italian Trans Geographies tackles this question by retracing trans and gender-variant experiences within the Italian peninsula and along diasporic routes. The volume adopts a cross-disciplinary approach that combines scholarly analyses with grassroots engagement and creative work and centers the voices of Italian and Italian American transpeople through autobiographies, memoirs, interviews, poetry, and visual works. The contributions include works by key Italian trans activists, including Romina Cecconi, Porpora Marcasciano, and Helena Velena, as well as critical interpretations of scholars and artists (many of whom self-identify as trans). Ultimately, these voices show how trans people have contributed to shaping Italian places and cultures while, in turn, being shaped by those places and cultures. Through its attention to geospecific sites, the book highlights blind spots in the hegemonic Anglo-American discourse about gender and overlooked intersections between LGBTQIA+ global discourse and local realities.
Download or read book Female Cultural Production in Modern Italy written by Sharon Hecker and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-04-13 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first critical interdisciplinary examination in English of Italian women’s contributions to intellectual, artistic, and cultural production in modern Italy. Examining commonalities and diversities from the country’s Unification to today, the volume provides insight into the challenges that Italian women engaged in cultural production have faced, and the strategies they have deployed in order to achieve their objectives. The essays address a range of issues, from women’s self-identification and public ownership of their professional roles as laborers in the intellectual and cultural realm, to questions about motherhood and financial remuneration, to the role of creative foreign women in Italy. Through critical analysis and direct testimony from new and typically marginalized voices, including an Arab-Italian writer, an Italian-Dominican filmmaker, and a transgender activist, new forms of ongoing struggle emerge that redefine the culturally diverse landscape of female intellectual and creative production in Italy today. The volume rethinks a solely national “Made in Italy” reading of the subject of female intellectual labor, demonstrating instead the wide network of influences and relationships that have existed for Italian women in their professional aspirations.
Download or read book Queer Apocalypses written by Lorenzo Bernini and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-10 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an attempt to save “the sexual” from the oblivion to which certain strands in queer theory tend to condemn it, and at the same time to limit the risks of anti-politics and solipsism contained in what has been termed antisocial queer theory. It takes a journey from Sigmund Freud to Mario Mieli and Guy Hocquenghem, from Michel Foucault and Judith Butler to Teresa de Lauretis, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, and Tim Dean, and from all of these thinkers back to Immanuel Kant and Thomas Hobbes. At the end, through readings of Bruce LaBruce’s movies on gay zombies, the elitism of antisocial queer theory is brought into contact with popular culture. The living dead come to represent a dispossessed form of subjectivity, whose monstrous drives are counterposed to predatory desires of liberal individuals. The reader is thus lead into the interstitial spaces of the Queer Apocalypses, where the past and the future collapse onto the present, and sexual minorities resurrect to the chance of a non-heroic political agency.
Download or read book The Round Dance written by Carmine Abate and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-13 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The village of Hora is a magical place that blurs the boundaries between a mythical past and the present. It is here that Costantino Avati grows alongside his impetuous and melancholic father, Francesco; his mother, Elena, who hides a secret torment; his two sisters, Orlandina and Lucrezia; and his grandfather Lissandro, the last custodian of an era and a world that are disappearing. As Costantino feels the pangs of first love with the intriguing Roman Isabella, he also discovers the romantic allure of his own village and its rich cultural heritage. In his first novel, acclaimed author Carmine Abate transforms his Italo-Albanian (Arbëresh) hometown of Carfizzi, Calabria, into a magical realist wonderland that rivals Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo. Inspired by the oral traditions of the old Albanian bards and incorporating the poetic local dialect, The Round Dance is a unique piece of multicultural literature that was named by the publishing house Mondadori as one of the one hundred greatest Italian novels of the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Caravaggio Syndrome written by Alessandro Giardino and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-12 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leyla is a headstrong Brooklyn-born art historian at a prestigious upstate New York college. When she meets feckless young computer technician Pablo at a party, she quickly becomes pregnant with his child. There’s only one problem: she can’t stand him. And one more problem: her student Michael wants Pablo for himself. Amid this love triangle, the objects of Leyla and Michael’s study take on a life of their own. Trying to learn more about Caravaggio’s masterpiece The Seven Works of Mercy, they pore over the journal and prison writings of maverick 17th-century utopian philosopher Tommaso Campanella, which, as if by enchantment, transport them back four centuries to Naples. And while the past and present miraculously converge, Leyla, Michael, and Tommaso embark on a voyage of self-discovery in search of a new life. In this fusion of historical, queer, and speculative fiction, Alessandro Giardino combines the intellectual playfulness of Umberto Eco with the psychological finesse of Michael Cunningham.
Download or read book The Weight of the Printed Word written by Steve Wright and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-16 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Weight of the Printed Word, Steve Wright explores the creation and use of documents as a key dimension in the activities of the Italian workerists during the 1960s and 1970s, as they sought to organise amongst new subjectivities of mass rebellion.
Download or read book A History of Neapolitan Drama in the Twentieth Century written by Mariano D'Amora and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-25 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world that tends to homologate, thus becoming, in every aspect of our lives, grey, flat and uniform, so creating the world of universal similarity (including language), does it still make sense today to talk about vernacular theatre? Tackling such a question implies uncovering the reasons for the disappearance of the many regional theatres that were present in Italy in the nineteenth century. There is no doubt that first the unification of the country in 1861, and then the language policies of fascism in the ‘30s were the final nails in the coffin for local theatres. It is also true, however, that what really determined their downsizing was the progressive loss of connection with their own environment. If we give an essentially superficial interpretation to the adjective “vernacular”, and in a play we see a canovaccio (plot) that the local star uses as a vehicle to show his talent through a series of modest mannerisms, then “vernacular” implies the death certificate of this type of theatre (once the star dies, his alleged dramaturgy dies with him and his mannerisms). On the contrary, if we identify in this adjective the theatre’s healthy attempt to develop a local, social and cultural analysis of its environment, it opens a whole new meaning and acquires a perspective that a national theatre can never aspire to. This is the case of Neapolitan theatre. It managed to survive and thrive, producing plays that were capable of critically describing modern and contemporary reality. Neapolitan playwrights forcefully proclaimed their roots as a primary source for their work. The city, in fact, became a direct expression of that cultural microcosm which provided them with the living flesh of their plots.
Download or read book When Things Happen written by Angelo Cannavacciuolo and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-13 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michele Campo is living the bourgeois Italian dream. Now a speech pathologist in his forties, he resides in an expensive Naples home with his partner, Costanza, daughter of an upper-class family. Michele’s own family origins, however, are murkier. When he is assigned to work with five-year-old foster child Martina, he grows increasingly engrossed by her case, as his own buried family history slowly claws its way back to the surface. The first novel by acclaimed Italian writer Angelo Cannavacciuolo to be translated into English, When Things Happen tells a powerful and intriguing story of what we lose when we leave our origins behind. It presents a panoramic view of Neapolitan society unlike any in literature, revealing a city of extreme contrasts, with a glamorous center ringed by suburban squalor. Above all, it is a psychologically nuanced portrait of a man struggling to locate what he values in life and the poor vulnerable child who helps him find it.
Download or read book Life Brazen and Garish written by Dacia Maraini and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-12 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three generations of women live together under the same roof. Though they are united by blood, each of the Cascadei women has a very different personality and way of expressing herself. Teenage daughter Lori scribbles impulsively in her diary, so eager to speed off on her moped that she rarely bothers with punctuation. Mother Maria, a professional translator, writes detailed and observant letters yet doesn’t see what is happening right in front of her. And grandmother Gesuina, a former stage actress, speaks into an audio recorder, giving a provocative and brutally candid performance for an imagined audience that might never listen. Life, Brazen and Garish offers a fresh take on the epistolary novel, telling the story of a family through the fragmented and disparate perspectives of daughter, mother, and grandmother. Yet even as each woman endures her private struggles with love and betrayal, youth and maturity, knowledge and ignorance, reality and illusion, the Cascadeis forge a solidarity that transcends generations. In turns heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny, this novel is a triumph of narrative voice and literary style from one of Italy’s most renowned writers. Questo libro è stato tradotto grazie a un contributo del Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale italiano. This book has been translated thanks to a contribution from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.
Download or read book Embodying Peripheries written by Kuan Hwa and published by Firenze University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-31 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book combines approaches from the design disciplines, humanities, and social sciences to foster interdisciplinary engagement across geographies around the identities embodied in and of peripheries. Peripheral communities bear human faces and names, necessitating specific modes of inquiry and commitments that prioritize lived human experience and cultural expression. Hence, the peripheries of this book are a question, not a given, the answers to which are contingent forms assembled around embodied identities. Peripheries are urban fringes, periphery countries in the modern world-system, Indigenous lands, occupied territories, or the peripheries of authoritative knowledge, among others. No form can exist outside historical relations of power enacted through knowledge, political structures, laws, and regulations.
Download or read book Glory written by Giuseppe Berto and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-29 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christ’s nemesis Judas Iscariot remains a shadowy figure in the four canonical gospels, which give contradictory reasons for why this rogue disciple betrays Christ. But how would Judas himself explain his motives? In Glory, Italian modernist Giuseppe Berto’s final novel, Judas finally tells his side of the story. From his perspective, Jesus is the betrayer, a would-be political activist and social reformer who fails to live up to his promises. And by fulfilling his predestined role in the drama of Christ’s death and resurrection, Judas himself is partly responsible for humanity’s salvation, enabling them to be redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice. As the novel probes into the psychological motivations behind his rejection of Jesus’ authority, Judas emerges as a compelling conflicted character, a man who seeks to have agency even when he knows his actions are being scripted by a higher power. Through Judas’s searing tortured monologues, this late masterpiece from one of Italy’s greatest writers investigates deep questions about the nature of faith, rebellion, fate, and free will.
Download or read book Antigone s Ghosts written by Mark A. Wolfgram and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sophocles' play Antigone is a starting point for understanding the perpetual problems of human societies, families, and individuals who are caught up in the terrible aftermath of mass violence. What is one to do after the killing has stopped? What can be done to prevent a round of new violence? The tragic and dramatic tension in the play is put in motion by setting an unyielding Antigone against King Creon. As we see through the investigation of how Germany, Japan, Spain, Yugoslavia and Turkey have dealt with their histories of mass violence and genocide in the 20th century, the forces represented by Antigone and Creon remain very much part of our world today. Through a comparison of the five countries, their political institutions, and cultural traditions, we begin to appreciate the different pathways that societies have taken when confronting their violent histories. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Download or read book What Gender is Motherhood written by Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Oyěwùmí extends her path-breaking thesis that in Yorùbá society, construction of gender is a colonial development since the culture exhibited no gender divisions in its original form. Taking seriously indigenous modes and categories of knowledge, she applies her finding of a non-gendered ontology to the social institutions of Ifá, motherhood, marriage, family and naming practices. Oyěwùmí insists that contemporary assertions of male dominance must be understood, in part, as the work of local intellectuals who took marching orders from Euro/American mentors and colleagues. In exposing the depth of the coloniality of power, Oyěwùmí challenges us to look at the worlds we inhabit, anew.
Download or read book Cultural Genocide written by Lawrence Davidson and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-08 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most scholars of genocide focus on mass murder. Lawrence Davidson, by contrast, explores the murder of culture. He suggests that when people have limited knowledge of the culture outside of their own group, they are unable to accurately assess the alleged threat of others around them. Throughout history, dominant populations have often dealt with these fears through mass murder. However, the shock of the Holocaust now deters today’s great powers from the practice of physical genocide. Majority populations, cognizant of outside pressure and knowing that they should not resort to mass murder, have turned instead to cultural genocide as a “second best” politically determined substitute for physical genocide. In Cultural Genocide, this theory is applied to events in four settings, two events that preceded the Holocaust and two events that followed it: the destruction of American Indians by uninformed settlers who viewed these natives as inferior and were more intent on removing them from the frontier than annihilating them; the attack on the culture of Eastern European Jews living within Russian-controlled areas before the Holocaust; the Israeli attack on Palestinian culture; and the absorption of Tibet by the People’s Republic of China. In conclusion, Davidson examines the mechanisms that may be used to combat today’s cultural genocide as well as the contemporary social and political forces at work that must be overcome in the process.
Download or read book King of Hearts written by Baker A. Rogers and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While drag subcultures have gained mainstream media attention in recent years, the main focus has been on female impersonators. Equally lively, however, is the community of drag kings: cis women, trans men, and non-binary people who perform exaggerated masculine personas onstage under such names as Adonis Black, Papi Chulo, and Oliver Clothesoff. King of Hearts shows how drag king performers are thriving in an unlikely location: Southern Bible Belt states like Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina. Based on observations and interviews with sixty Southern drag kings, this study reveals how they are challenging the region’s gender norms while creating a unique community with its own distinctive Southern flair. Reflecting the region’s racial diversity, it profiles not only white drag kings, but also those who are African American, multiracial, and Hispanic. Queer scholar Baker A. Rogers—who has also performed as drag king Macon Love—takes you on an insider’s tour of Southern drag king culture, exploring its history, the communal bonds that unite it, and the controversies that have divided it. King of Hearts offers a groundbreaking look at a subculture that presents a subversion of gender norms while also providing a vital lifeline for non-gender-conforming Southerners.
Download or read book Run for the Wall written by Raymond J. Michalowski and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Run for the Wall is a highly readable ethnographic account of this remarkable American ritual. The authors, themselves motorcyclists as well as Run participants, demonstrate that the event is a form of secular pilgrimage. Here key concepts in American culture-- "freedom," and "brotherhood," for example--are constructed and deployed in a variety of rituals and symbols to enable participants to come to terms with the consequences of the Vietnam war. While the focus is the journey itself, the book also explores other themes related to American culture and history, including the nature of community, the Vietnam war, and the creation of American secular ritual.
