Queering the South: case studies with Emma Dante

Thesis

This thesis analyses the films and plays by Sicilian director Emma Dante by adopting a queer approach. While the focus is on Dante’s works that that thematise LGBTQIA+ histories, identity positions, and embodiments, the thesis also expands onto her other films and plays. Differentiating itself from the majority of Dante scholarship (Barsotti 2009; Scattina 2019), it focuses on Dante’s queering practice and uses it as an incitement to further investigate the poetics of haunting, kinship, and the Southern cultural archive.

Furthermore, the thesis places Dante’s work in the divided Italian socio-cultural context, as internal racialising processes promote the ‘progressive’ North in contrast to the ‘backward’ South. This rhetoric, which can be traced back to the Italian Unification in the nineteenth century, involves the representation of the LGBTQIA+ community as well, as Southern individuals are deemed as representative of a pre-modern form of sexuality (Barbagli and Colombo 2007; Dall'Orto 2015). While this polarising view is predominant, contemporary cultural practitioners and theorists from Southern Italy have attempted to disrupt this temporal binary (Ferrante 2019; Polizzi 2022).

First, it is argued that Dante is a prime example of this oppositional cultural trend. Moreover, by queerly tracing the connections that Dante’s oeuvre establishes with a larger genealogy of cultural works that are both queer and Southern (Letizia Battaglia, Liliana Cavani, Vincent Dieutre, Jolanda Insana, Curzio Malaparte, Fabio Mollo, Elsa Morante, Ferzan Özpetek, Emanuela Pirelli, Nicola Sisci and Paolo Valerio), the thesis states that queerness should be added as a core element of Franco Cassano’s Southern epistemology (2012). Working on Emma Dante and with Emma Dante (on Dante’s oeuvre and on an expansive cultural network constituted through it), this thesis claims that queerness, instead of being the marginal ‘other’ of the Italian South, is at the core of its cultural, theoretical, and epistemological articulation.

Authors: Parrinello, A

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-j0gy7gpob
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English and Italian
• Keywords: queerness; queer meridionalism; Emma Dante; Southern epistemology
• Subjects: Queer theory; Italian cinema; Feminist films; Performance; Cultural studies