Italian Studies in Southern Africa/Studi d'Italianistica nell'Africa Australe

Gramsci In The World: Piero Sraffa and the first editions of the prison writings

Joseph Francese — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Dopo aver riassunto e commentato i contributi a Gramsci in the World, un volume collettaneo curato da Roberto M. Dainotto e Fredric Jameson, aggiungo una ‘chiosa’ in cui parlo del modo in cui nel secondo dopoguerra la figura storica di Antonio Gramsci fu contestualizzata nella storia del Partito comunista italiano. A questo fine, prendo in considerazione l’importante ruolo svolto da Piero Sraffa da eminenza grigia dietro la pubblicazione delle prime edizioni delle Opere di Gramsci. Sraffa partecipò sia come garante delle ultime volontà di Gramsci sia come collaboratore di Felice Platone, il curatore delle prime edizioni dei Quaderni del carcere e delle Lettere dal carcere. Questi testi furono concepiti e programmati all’indomani della guerra, cioè nel periodo dell’unità nazionale antifascista, ma videro la luce qualche anno dopo, in piena Guerra
fredda. Pertanto, occorreva gestire diverse e contrastanti esigenze, fra cui quella di persistere nell’esaltazione della figura di Gramsci, leader onorario del movimento operaio nella ‘via italiana’ al socialismo e quindi ‘contrappeso’ in Italia al culto di Stalin. Bisognava trovare altresì il modo di presentare Gramsci, e quanto prima, a pubblici divergenti — intellettuali da una parte e lettori meno colti dall’altra — posticipando al futuro una edizione critica dei quaderni gramsciani.

Queerizzare la norma anglofona: Culture sessuali e di genere nell’italia contemporanea

Cirus Rinaldi, Samuele Grassi — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

No Abstract.

Nineteenth-Century Italian Women Writers and the Woman Question. The Case of Neera. New York e Londra: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2021.

Debora Bellinzani — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

No Abstract.

Amicizia e reti di cura tra persone LGBTQ nel welfare Mediterraneo

Beatrice Gusmano — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The contribution presents the radicality of the daily experiences of LGBTQ people who live non-monogamous relationships in the mononormative context of Italian society; of lesbian and bisexual mothers who clash with the monomaternalism synthesised by the Italian saying “di mamma ce n’è una sola”; of LGBQ friends who choose to live together as a life choice, challenging the heteronormativity of the stages that mark adulthood and the precariousness that characterises Southern Europe. Such radical choices are made possible by the construction of networks of care and friendship that are not contemplated by the Mediterranean welfare and that are analysed here through the narratives collected in Rome during the ERC Starting Grant project Intimate – Micropolitics of Intimacy in Southern Europe: Citizenship, Care and Choice (2014-2019).

L’utilizzo delle risorse web per finalità affettivo-sessuali: Fra autodeterminazione e produzione dell’omonormatività

Giuseppe Masullo — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This essay aims to highlight the role that the environments offered by the web society – specifically online dating applications – play in defining collective desires and imaginaries whose influence spreads well beyond those same virtual environments, also affecting social and sexual interactions offline. We will examine this aspect by focusing on a notoriously stigmatised population, i.e., transgender people, who are still socially invisible. We will start by considering that the individuals involved in these digital contexts, through their socio-sexual interactions, participate in the social construction of the meanings associated with sexuality. These are at the same time innovative and harbingers of new forms of discrimination within the rainbow community. As such, they can suitably frame the homonormativity processes underway.

Maschilità omosessuali tra sesso e amicizia. Come le ‘dating apps’ riscrivono i copioni sessuali nel XXI secolo

Marco Bacio, Cirus Rinaldi — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This paper analysis sexual scripts theory in relation to gay men courtship, love relationships, and casual sex. The aim is to understand how gay masculinity is evolving in the 21st Century. Previous research has reinforced the concept that gay men follow heterosexual masculinity and scripts in their relationships with other men. Here, analysing data from the most used gay dating app ‘Grindr’, we try to understand the balance among the different needs gay men in Italy express in their daily lives: from friendship to love, from casual sex to long-term relationships. Indeed, applying the heterosexual cultural script to gay men is problematic because hegemonic masculinity is also reinforced in gay interactions instead of being contested. Gay sexuality means the construction of hybrid relations: intimacy, trust, friendship, reciprocity, and sex merge together in unprecedented ways.

Giovani e rappresentazioni delle maschilità nei social network

Gian Luca Pilia, Cosimo Marco Scarcelli — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Social network platforms represent spaces where boys and girls can experiment with their identity by working on the processes of self-presentation and impression management. Based on a qualitative research that involved 36 Italian males aged from fourteen to eighteen years old, the paper focuses on how masculine identity is produced, reproduced and performed by boys in social network sites. The analysis suggests that social network can be seen as spaces where boys build and perform gender, frequently in contraposition to the idea they have about girls and what they retain female characteristics.

Di cosa parliamo quando parliamo di pornografia femminista

Walters Stefano Baroni — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The paper takes stock of the situation of Italian feminist pornography by considering it from the background of the U.S. and U.K. debate about the relationship between women, feminism and porn. In the first part, it examines the transformation of pornography into an epistemic object by the so-called Porn Studies and the ambiguous definition they provide for this. The paper focuses on the feminist political programme concerning porn as it emerges from The Feminist Porn Book (2013) and the work of well-known feminist directors and performers like Tristan Taormino, Maddison Young and Erika Lust. After illustrating the broader international context, the article directs its attention to the Italian scene and takes into account Monica Strambini’s and Le ragazze del porno’s initiatives. The final results of this investigation are essentially ambiguous: on the one hand, feminist pornography promises emancipation through pornography – by opening new realms to the desire – on the other, the new feminist porn looks imbued with a hidden twenty-first-century Victorian ethos.

Hotspots: Pratiche produttive, artistiche e di militanza nei luoghi della sessualità in Italia

Mariella Popolia — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Starting from the results of a field research about pornographies conducted in Italy, Canada, and USA between 2014 and 2017, the contribution aims to offer a sort of a draft map, a reasoned description of places and experiences that had been crossed and observed in Italy. Among the places I will focus on are queerporn festivals and performances, a feminist sexy shop and library, and an academic spring school on porn studies, just to mention few of them. These “hotspots”, as I have decided to call them, should be understood as observation points of permanence or change of the gender and sexual orders in Italian contemporary society, which, straddling productive, militant, and artistic practices, contribute to the creation of what we could define as a queer and transfeminist sexual and pornographic culture.

L’elefante nella stanza tutta per sé. Ristrutturare da terrone un laboratorio sull’intersezionalità

Francesca De Rosa, Antonia Anna Ferrante — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This contribution is designed as a “construction site”, or work-in-progress following from “The elephant in the room of one’s own”, a workshop that took place as collective experience and writing project, as well as an open-ended
and ongoing discussion. Just like the workshop, it will focus on intersectionality and its implications for processes of cultural appropriation, colonial repressions, internal colonialism, and homonationalism. The paper is made up of three parts/rooms: in the “storage”, we deal with colonial foreclosure and its ghosts; in the “salon”, we deal with whiteness and homonormative regime of visibility; finally, we explore the possibilities of a brand new and more inclusive room of one’s own. This contribution is part of a larger project whose focus is not to reconstruct an archive “proper”, but rather, to develop a dispositif aimed at activating/enacting our common repertoire of knowledges as racialized/queer feminist scholars and activists.

Nella “Voragine pietosa”: Corpo e controllo in La storia e Aracoeli di Elsa Morante

Valentina Nesi — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The essay proposes the analysis of existing interrelations between body and control in La Storia and Aracoeli by Elsa Morante. The aim is to emphasise in these two novels how the body assumes value of object on which to try exerting dominance in order to preserve the ego. The body is understood here as a collection of imagined and symbolic experiences (Maffesoli, 2013). The methodological approach of the essay is based on Shilder’s psychoanalytic theories. He argued that there was a constant exchange between our own corporal image and that of others; therefore, this exchange can create relations between psychological impulses and some aspects of the body image. Besides, through a phenomenological approach and the Judith Butler reflection about power, the essay shows how, in the Morante novels, the female protagonists’ body control over their children (exercised unconsciously) is a repossession desire of their own past.

Immagini di donne nel Primo libro delle opere toscane di Laura Battiferra: L’aspetto divino della natura femminile

Anna Griva — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Τhe object of this study is the presence of female in some characteristic poems of Primo libro delle opere toscane (1560) by Laura Battiferra. The woman in the poems of Battiferra is an entity with divine properties, which reveals to the humans the secrets of an eternal and indestructible world. The poetry of Battiferra can uncover the way the Renaissance world foregrounds the female as creator and actor of the social evolution, as well as a catalyst for the
understanding of the cosmic mystery.

Tipi industriali di metà novecento: Tra letteratura Italiana e pensiero sociologico

Luca Bifulco — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Literature is an important source for sociological discourse, since in narratives it can find inspiration, a tool for comparison and a lively representation of its analytical categories. Thus, this paper aims to analyse some of the most important books of Italian mid-twentieth century industrial literature: Tempi Stretti and Donnarumma all’assalto by Ottiero Ottieri, first, then Il calzolaio di Vigevano and Il maestro di Vigevano by Lucio Mastronardi, and Memoriale by Paolo Volponi. The representations described in these books – immersed in the specific historical context of their time – reflect, consolidate, and interact with the categories and concepts through which many important sociological thinkers have interpreted industrial modernity. They can provide indications on the meanings through which it was possible to understand modern society. The main categories used in this analysis will be industrial work, the figure of the capitalist and social conflicts.

The unmaking of a nation: Maria Messina’s “Casa paterna”

Giordana Poggioli-Kaftan — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Questo articolo mette in risalto la presa di coscienza di Vanna, protagonista del racconto di Maria Messina, della sua subalternità, come donna, all’interno della nazione. Vanna, mancando di soggettività sociale e politica, è forzata a vivere in una condizione di dipendenza economica e, quindi, di dislocamento, non avendo neanche il diritto a possedere lo spazio domestico al quale è relegata. Non potendo più vivere all’interno di codici comportamentali e ideologici della borghesia liberale dell’Italia a cavallo tra i due secoli, Vanna vive in una
condizione di oltrepassamento, e quindi di esilio, non dissimile da quella del soggetto coloniale. Per tanto, a Vanna viene a mancare un codice linguistico per articolare i suoi desideri di autonomia finanziaria e di accesso allo spazio
pubblico, cioè culturale e politico. Il suo suicidio non è dunque fuga, ma bensì atto di resistenza contro un ritorno ad una vita che, nella sua condizione di oltrepassamento, non può più accettare. In questa analisi si evidenziano inoltre le strategie letterarie e narrative di cui fa uso Messina per poter navigare il mondo letterario e editoriale italiano dei primi del Novecento, ancora fortemente prevenuto contro le donne scrittrici.

Israeli and Italian Educational Policies on Giftedness and the Levers to Talent for Language Learning: A Comparative Study

Alice Azzalini — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

L’articolo presenta uno studio comparativo tra le politiche educative israeliane ed italiane riguardanti la plusdotazione, con particolare attenzione all’ambito linguistico. Nello specifico, vengono indagate le possibili “azioni” capaci di incrementare il talento applicabili, successivamente, al contesto didattico. Dallo studio di una consolidata politica israeliana volta a investire nei talenti, è emerso che tre sono i fattori chiave capaci di farne da leva: 1. L’investimento nelle politiche educative sin dai primissimi anni di età, nonché la selezione, tra i 7 e gli 8 anni, di allievi con plusdotazione; 2. L’esposizione a diverse lingue e l’importanza dell’interdisciplinarità; 3. La rilevanza di uno studio attivo basato su questioning e reasoning. Sotto un’ala contrastiva, tuttavia, è emerso come il sistema israeliano concernente la plusdotazione abbia carattere selettivo, mentre quello italiano, seppur più recente, vada verso un’ottica inclusiva dove il talento vuole essere messo a disposizione di tutti, non solo degli allievi “gifted”.