[Commlist] CFP What’s Queer in Italian Film History?

*/What’s Queer in Italian Film History?
Looking for Non-normative Representations from the Silent Era to the 1960s/*

Download the CFP 
<http://www.airsc.org/callforpapers/?fbclid=IwAR3bxr7OyfY5V9dr9CurS7nlqqh8MrS-4AyWriggyZ0fKuVgwCl4uZxZOu4>

Deadline: 20 December 2019

From the early 1990s onward, the theoretical reflection on gender 
identities and non-binary sexualities (Butler 1990; Sedgwick 1990; 
Koyama 2003) has increasingly challenged the assumption of hegemonic 
paradigms of heteronormativity as totalizing categories of gender 
identities and sexualities. In the last few years, critiques of 
heteronormativity have moved forward from the analysis of contemporary 
cultural products to the proposal of new paths of historical inquiry, 
which are gaining currency under the label of “queer historicism” 
(McCabe 2005).

In this context, Italian cinema historiography—which only recently has 
been able to incorporate the perspectives of feminist film studies 
(Cardone 2009; Pravadelli 2012; Hipkins 2016; Dall’Asta 2008)—has 
remained so far reluctant to apply transfeminist (Koyama 2001) and queer 
approaches to the representation of gender and sexuality. And yet, 
destabilizing forms of gender representation and non-normative modes of 
reception can be found through the history of Italian cinema since its 
origins. From Fregoli and the farcical performances of comedians like 
André Deed (Cretinetti), Raymond Frau (Kri Kri) and Gigetta Morano, to a 
unique film of its kind like /Filibus /(1915), the use of crossdressing 
to display unconventional gender roles was more than familiar to Italian 
film audiences. The popular “forzuti” of the 1910s introduced a model of 
a hypertrophic (although basically asexual) virility that stimulated 
both male and female gazes for generations, well beyond the 1960s (Dyer 
1997). The popular genres that flourished in the 1950s, such as the 
spaghetti westerns and horrors, have nurtured the fantasies of 
international queer audiences with images of duels imbued with 
homosexual desire, rebellious dancing witches and ambiguous vampire 
beauties. The 1950s and 1960s saw film theatres become meeting and 
cruising sites for queer communities, and this not just in big cities 
like Rome, Milan and Florence, but also in many provincial towns (Pini 
2011). More generally—and similarly to the experience of other queer 
audiences living in different geographical and historical contexts 
(Russo 1981; Doty 1993; Dyer 2001)—the ritual of collective film 
consumption offered non-normative subjectivities an opportunity to 
develop and express original forms of spectatorship and cinephilia 
(Santi 1954). Detecting and collecting the feeble traces of such 
ephemeral experiences is a critical task for the methodology of queer 
archiving (Przybylo and Cooper 2014).

Based on these premises, this special issue of /Immagine /aims to assess 
the viability and productivity of a queer approach to the archive of 
Italian film history, from the origins to the 1960s, taking a chance to 
discover evidences that can trouble the established picture provided by 
traditional male and heteronormative accounts. The ambition is to 
contribute to the methodological reflections inspired by queer 
historicism, keeping in mind that queer theory is obviously in dialogue 
with both postcolonial and intersectional approaches to gender, 
sexuality, class and ethnicity (Dominguez-Ruvalcaba 2016; Giuliani 
2017). In particular, a queer approach to Italian film history 
challenges static notions of national cinema, encouraging the adoption 
of transnational and transcultural perspectives (Schoonover and Galt, 2017).

We welcome methodological reflections that interrogate the criticalities 
of queer historicism, and specifically of the notion of “queer 
anachronism” (Rohy 2017): Is it reasonable to detect queerness in films 
that were produced at a time when non-binary subjects did not identify 
as queer yet? How can queer historicism integrate and/or dialogue with 
other approaches, such as those developed in the related fields of 
feminist, gay and lesbian film historiographies (Gledhill and Knight 
2015; Benshoff e Griffin 2006; Giori 2017)? How can it help understand 
certain eccentric projects, born outside of the mainstream of Italian 
film styles, such as those developed by Aldo Braibanti and Carmelo Bene? 
And finally, to paraphrase Heather Love’s reflections (2007), what is 
the meaning for us, today, of a history in which queerness and isolated 
queer figures emerged from a film culture that fostered homophobia and 
stigmatized queer bodies?


Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:


  *

    Border-crossing heteronormative conventions in popular genres

  *

    Queering the Cult: subcultural practices and fandom inspired by
    actors and stars

  *

    Home movies

  *

    Queer performances: Gender bending, drag and masquerade

  *

    Queer temporalities: Anachronisms, queer historicism, queer
    archives, anti-futurity

  *

    Eccentric film styles and projects

  *

    Film theaters as cruising sites

  *

    Queer film criticism

  *

    Transnational and transcultural dialogism

  *

    Italian /auteur/cinema and the queer gaze

  *

    Documentaries and non normative sexuality

  *

    Melodrama, sexuality/asexuality and romance

  *

    Archiving the history of queer cinema and spectatorship

  *

    Disability and queerness


Abstracts, either in Italian or English (max. 250 words), will have to 
be submitted no later than 20 December 2019 to:

(dmissero /at/ brookes.ac.uk) <mailto:(dmissero /at/ brookes.ac.uk)>

(micaela.veronesi /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(micaela.veronesi /at/ gmail.com)>

Notification of acceptance by 7 January 2020.

Articles (5-6,000 words max.) can be submitted in Italian or English, by 
14 June 2020.

Final publication is expected by December 2020, after the conclusion of 
a double bind peer review process.


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