Women and Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema

Lerner, Giovanna Faleschini

doi:10.2307/j.ctv3029sgg

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…But while the mainstream of Italian Studies in the United States may want to work further on denaturalizing the canon they work with, 1 I am more interested in addressing scholars who like me think against the grain of canon formation. In carving out space for texts that do not fit in the major fictions about Italy, Italianists have often relied upon fixed epistemic categories such as "women's writing in Italy" (Cox, 2008) and "women in contemporary Italian cinema" (Di Bianco, 2023;Faleschini Lerner, 2022); "Italian homosexuality" (Duncan, 2006); and "migrant writers in Italy" (Parati, 2017). While this important work has complicated the stories we tell in Italian Studies, it runs the risks of unwittingly smuggling in-much like the national family romance of more canonic endeavors-a knowable social formation called "Italy" understood as a genuine community of writers, filmmakers, readers, and viewers; epistemically transparent Italians that, while more pluralistically imagined than before, are still contained within the borders of the nation and its tradition, as well as neatly divided up into men and women, straights and queers, and supposedly indigenous and migrant cultural producers and consumers.…”

Section: Calling All Killjoysmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not straight from Italy: Seeking anti-national killjoys in Italian Studies

Bassi

2023

Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies

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When, at a conference in my field, I am one of a handful of people whose research approach to Italian Studies is drawn from Queer Studies, I grapple with feelings of intellectual isolation. In those moments, the image that Pier Vittorio Tondelli (2006) used in opening Camere separate comes to mind. Leo, the novel's queer protagonist, is on a plane above the Alps at sunset gazing at a view both beautiful and unsettling. Looking out of the airplane window, he can only make out the outline of the mountain chain, its distinct shape impressing upon him and capturing his imagination. Immersed as it is in the melancholic hue of the evening sky, the landscape looks to Leo like an abstract painting framed by the oval shape of the oblò. The "abisso cobalto" (Tondelli, 2006: 7) he is staring at feels cold and distant, yet somewhat comforting in its orderly aloofness. When the light suddenly switches on, Leo sees his own face superimposed on the landscape and the previous order becomes jumbled, confusing, uncanny even-as if the shape of the natural world could not assimilate the lines, vectors, lights, and shadows that form the outline of Leo's queer self.Like other fields in the Modern Languages, Italian Studies has attempted to fit within its own disciplinary design the subjectivities-queer, trans, and non-binary (Amin, 2022) -that have animated Queer Studies since the seminal publication of Judith Butler's (2006) Gender Trouble in 1990. Since the turn of the century, Queer Studies has moved towards an increasingly intersectional understanding of identity formation (Eng

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Section: Calling All Killjoysmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not straight from Italy: Seeking anti-national killjoys in Italian Studies

Bassi

2023

Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies

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“…Orton-Johnson, 2017), web and TV series (e.g. Lerner, 2018;Rodgers, 2019), and social media (e.g. Feldman, 2021;Zappavigna and Zhao, 2017).…”

Section: So What About Mothers?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Works point to an ambivalent 'double-pull' movement (Mary et al, 2023) that offers a large variety of ideologies which concurrently 'displace' and 'refix' traditional norms (Renold and Ringrose, 2011). The characters in a TV series analysed by Lerner (2018) for example simultaneously criticise and admire women they perceive as 'perfect' (read: traditionally normative) mothers. This is not surprising if we think of the tensions that are inherent to identities, like the performance of femininity.…”

Section: So What About Mothers?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructing a Mothers’ Culture: Affective Bargains in Branding Discourses

Mary,

Duschinsky,

Coughlan

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Cultural studies has often favoured a Foucauldian framework that focuses on the role that discourses play in shaping individuals’ subject positions. The task of researchers has been to unravel normative discourses and/or identify acts of resistance. In practice, this frequently presupposes a duality between (passive) dominance and (active) resistance, treating as automatic and uninteresting the terms upon which dominant discourses are negotiated and accepted. But conformity to norms can be more complex. This article argues for extending Foucault by exploring the affective dimension of cultural discourses and their acceptance. We build on the theory of Lauren Berlant to analyse five brands targeted at UK mothers. We identify a mothers’ culture: a normative domain where a set of difficulties associated with managing both the imaginary and the lived practices of motherhood are expressed and organised through discourses.

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“…Although we aimed to publish around a volume a year, various intersecting factors meant that we did not issue a new volume in the series until 2020, but that year, three books were published in quick succession: Michele Monserrati's (2020) Searching for Japan, Charles Burdett et al's (2020) Transcultural Italies (the first, and to date only, edited volume in the series), and Valerie McGuire's (2020) Italy's Sea. The year 2022 saw the publication of Goffredo Polizzi's (2022) Reimagining the Italian South, and Giovanna Faleschini Lerner's (2022) Screening Hospitality. 2 In preparing this piece, I re-read each of these volumes in order to try and identify what they achieved not only as individual works, but as parts of a composite whole, and to see whether, in looking at them together, the current contours and future potentialities of our initially defined field of "postcolonial, global, and transnational Italian studies" would be brought into sharper focus for me.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Transnational Italian Cultures’: Editing as method

Bond

2023

Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies

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The issue editors invited contributors to this section on methodologies to reflect critically on the benefits and drawbacks of using a transnational approach to Italian cultures, and to assess whether the multiple and diverse applications of this approach have changed the field of Italian Studies more broadly. In order to offer some response to these questions, and to propose ways forward for work in this field during the decade to come, I want to focus here on my role as co-editor of the book series 'Transnational Italian Cultures.' 'Transnational Italian Cultures' was a joint initiative that my colleague Derek Duncan and I first proposed to Liverpool University Press in the summer of 2014. Looking back at the initial proposal that we sent to the press, I am struck by two things. The first is how we defined the scope of our inquiry as operating within "the burgeoning field of postcolonial, global and transnational Italian studies." The second is our stated aim to "bring together the outstanding work which is now being done in this area, and by bringing it together, set a new agenda for academic research on what constitutes Italian culture today" (emphasis mine). I am interested in the first statement because of how broadly we initially defined our "field" of inquiry, as spanning the intersecting spheres of postcolonial, global, and transnational studies, and I will return periodically to the still-shifting nature of how we set the boundaries of Transnational Italian Studies throughout this short piece. The second statement, however, is what I want to focus on: the importance of the act of "bringing together" the individual works in question in terms of providing a tailored space for their publication, but also in terms of what assembling a group of particular works means for the development of the wider field itself.In the paragraphs to come, I will thus seek to explore and offer some answers to the following questions through an analysis of the volumes we have published in the series to date. Why is it important to carve out a specific space of assemblage, such as an edited series, in order for a field of study to stretch, enfold, and develop? What can we learn by looking at the volumes in this particular series as constituent components of a community space? Can the sort of editorial work that Derek and I have carried out for the series be

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Women and Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Not straight from Italy: Seeking anti-national killjoys in Italian Studies

Not straight from Italy: Seeking anti-national killjoys in Italian Studies

Constructing a Mothers’ Culture: Affective Bargains in Branding Discourses

‘Transnational Italian Cultures’: Editing as method

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