KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Alessandro Giammei
Yale University
Queeratela, Queeredità
Alternative filologiche alla genealogia nel destino dell’opera di Michela Murgia
Bio note
ENG: Alessandro Giammei (he/him · lui/tu) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Italian Studies (Yale University). He specializes in modern and contemporary literature and art, questioning their fantasies of genealogical roots in early modern and classical cultures. Trained as a philologist and a literary historian in Italy, he moved to the US to hybridize his research and pedagogy with Queer theory, speculative realism, trans-historical and trans-national perspectives. Giammei’s first monograph, Nell’officina del nonsense di Toti Scialoja (edizioni del verri 2014), won the Harvard Edition of the Edinburgh Gadda Prize in 2015. He co-wrote Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting (Verso, 2023, with Ara H. Merjian) and Giulia Niccolai (Quodlibet, 2022, with Marco Belpoliti and Nunzia Palmieri). He translated Arthur Conan Doyle’s treatise on spirit photography (Fotografare gli spiriti, Marsilio, 2022) and the letters between Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey (Ti basta l’Atlantico?, nottetempo, 2021, with Chiara Valerio). He authored Una serie ininterrotta di gesti riusciti (Marsilio, 2018), a book of auto-theory and critical fabulation on Fitzgerald and Central New Jersey. His popular essay on gender and objects, Cose da maschi (Einaudi, 2023), was shortlisted for the Bridge Literary Award. His most recent work is Ariosto in the Machine Age (University of Toronto Press, 2024).
ITA: Alessandro Giammei è Assistant Professor in Italian Studies alla Yale University, dove si occupa, in prospettiva queer e trans-storica, di modernità italofona e delle sue illusioni di radicamento genealogico nel rinascimento e nella classicità. Tra i suoi ultimi libri ci sono Ariosto in the Machine Age (Toronto 2024), Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting (con Ara Merjian, Verso 2023), Cose da maschi (Einaudi 2023) e il pamphlet di prossima uscita Gioventù degli antenati: Il Rinascimento è uno zombie (Einaudi 2024). Suoi scritti e traduzioni sono apparsi in The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, Nuovi Argomenti e Flash Art. Tiene rubriche sulla maschilità per Esquire e per il quotidiano Domani.
Simonetta Grilli
University of Siena
Non-normative Relationality
The Contribution of Queer Kinship to the Debate on Kinship in Anthropology
Queer kinship represents the most visible, and extreme, part of the “metaorphosis” undergone by kinship in contemporary societies, serving as a privileged vantage point for critically reflecting on the processes of naturalization that affect/pervade gender, reproduction, and heterosexual sexuality. Anthropological attention to queer relationality is an integral component of the resurgence and reclamation of kinship in Western contexts through the new kinship studies (Strathern 1992; Carsten 2004; Weston, 1991, 1997; Schneider 1995; Franklin, 2013, 2014), whose primary interest in exploring the impact of changes in the biological reproduction process on people's lives (enabled by advances in fertility medicine) has expanded to include subjectivities (gay, lesbian, trans, etc.) long classified as "a non-procreative species", in Foucault's terms (1978).
Many epistemological challenges have emerged from queer kinship and reproduction: they suggest the possibility of weaving kinship beyond the boundaries of biology, beyond genders and sexed bodies, beyond genealogy, wherein the elective dimension assumes foundational significance (Lewin, 1993; Hayden, 1995; Mamo and Alston-Stepniz, 2015; Hérault 2014; Smietana, Thompson, and Twine, 2018; Gunnarson Payne and Erbenius 2018).Families with homosexual, bisexual, trans parents, and in general, "non (hetero)normative intimacies", (that have appeared on the social and political scene in recent decades), allow for an examination of the broadening contours of parenthood (pluriparenthood), identification of novel generative paradigms (beyond naturalized maternity), interpretation of the processes of biological and procreative resignification as collective endeavors (owing to involvement of third parties, donors, gestational carriers), and consideration of subjectivities and relationalities taking an eccentric stance vis-à-vis hegemonic models of reproduction and social continuity. : not only LGBTQI+ individuals, but also heterosexuals opting against coupledom, eschewing aspirations for familial establishment, intentionally forgoing procreation or opting for single parenthood, embracing non-standardized housing models, adopting non-progressive temporalities, and nevertheless finding themselves in conditions akin to queerness (Dahl and Gunnarson Payne 2014; Acquistapace, 2022).
In my presentation, I endeavor to succinctly trace some analytical and reflective trajectories evident in a corpus of socio-anthropological inquiries since the 1990s, which have delved into forms of queer relationality to grasp their actual and situated operation amidst normalizing tendencies and assertions of difference. Particularly following the consolidation of scholarly interest in the increasing desire for family and parenthood among gay and lesbian individuals, bisexual and trans individuals (largely confined in many countries, such as Italy, to conditions of social and legal vulnerability and invisibility), I am prompted to consider how queer relationality impacts the fundamental tenets of the so-called "Euro-American" kinship system (predicated on cognatism, couple centrality, biparentality) (Cadoret, 2008). Queer relationality poses a challenge to the symbolic order of heterosexuality and gender binary, which I propose to interpret not merely as a deconstruction of the domain of kinship and social reproduction (in a "compliant" sense), but rather as an extension and reconfiguration of it.
Bio note
Simonetta Grilli is a professor of Social Anthropology and Anthropology of the Family at the University of Siena. She has conducted research in southern Somalia and in various regions of Italy, including Tuscany, Sardinia, and Basilicata, focusing on themes related to family, kinship, and migration. Currently, her research focuses on issues related to gender identities, the anthropology of the body, domestic and care work, and new forms of family and kinship within Italian society. Among her publications are: "Scelte di famiglia. Tendenze della parentela nella società contemporanea" (ETS, 2010, with Francesco Zanotelli); "Per-formare corpi. Esperienze e rappresentazioni" (Unicopli, 2013); "Antropologia delle famiglie contemporanee" (Carocci, 2019); and "Parentele del terzo Millennio" (RAC, Il Mulino, 2022, with Claudia Mattalucci).
Maria Federica Moscati
University of Sussex
Dancing Queer Kinship and the Law
By eschewing concrete and essentialised gender/sex binaries queerness is about movement. And so are affects, and the various ways in which queer kinship is created and experienced. Conversely, family law is mainly about limiting movement by creating boundaries and by defining parameters of what a family should be. Thus, a question arises on how to make family law move in a way that it is coordinated with the movement created by queer families, and that embraces queer kinship and affection as catalysts of legal developments. One way to overcome static laws on queer kinship and families, is to re-imagine family and kinship legal categories through dance. Dance is a tool for knowledge-making (Mulcahy, 2021) and ‘affect’ is a lens of imagining law through dance. Thus, queer kinship and the law are reinterpreted through the affective praxis of dance. In my presentation, drawing upon the intersection of Isadora Duncan, Maurice Bejart, and Martha Graham approaches to dancing, and dance and law studies, I will analyse several aspects of the relation between queer kinship, affection and bonds and the law.
Bio note
Maria Federica (Marica) Moscati is Reader in Law and Society at the University of Sussex. She holds a PhD from SOAS and is an Italian advocate and trained mediator. Before undertaking her doctorate, she practised as family lawyer, and worked for Save the Children Italy where she specialised in children’s rights. Her research takes a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to investigate the interaction of diversity and the law, and she is now looking at how reimagining legal categories through dance. She has analysed, and published on, issues concerning Dispute Resolution, Comparative Family Law, Children's rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, and their intersection. She is co-director of the Centre for Cultures of Reproduction, Technologies and Health at University of Sussex; co-editor for EUP of the book series Comparative Legal Studies, Society and Justice; member of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Comparative Law. She is Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Marica combines academic interests with activism in support of queer people, and children. As a cause lawyer, she has been involved in a number of domestic and European court cases, and for her research on mediation in non-heteronarmative families, she has been awarded the National Mediation Award on Inclusion and Diversity. Drawing upon her experience as dancer, she has designed and launched an interdisciplinary learning initiative on Dance in Law, Politics and Sociology. She is one of the co-editors of the Queer Judgments Project, and co-founder of Semia - Fondo delle Donne.
References:
Mulcahy, Sean and Seear, Kate (2024) ‘ A “Tick and Flick” Exercise: Movement and Form in Australian Parliamentary Human Rights Scrutiny’. Dance Research Journal. Published online 2024:1-18. doi:10.1017/S0149767723000360
Mulcahy, Sean (2021) ‘Dances with laws: from metaphor to methodology’ . Law and Humanities, 15:1, 106-133.
Duncan, Isadora (1927) My Life. New York: Liveright.
Bejart, Maurice (2017) Lettere a un giovane danzatore. Torino: Lindau.
Nicoletta Vallorani
University of Milan
Queer youtopia.
Futuristic narratives in relational terms
The notion of “youtopia” that I propose here has a twofold birthmark. It is partly due to the concept of sympoiesis as inflected in Donna Haraway’s in Staying with the trouble (Haraway 2016) but it is also shaped by Ernst Bloch’s concept of utopia as a critical and collective desire that is primarily relational and concerns a “we” rather than an “I” (Bloch [1918] 2022). Relationality is a key concept in José Esteban Muñoz’s exploitation of Bloch’s theory, particularly in Cruising Utopia (Muñoz 2009) and in the effort of opposing the nihilistic drive of Lee Edelman (Edelman 2004). In both cases – in Haraway as well as in Muñoz - what is posited is a different way of living together: non-hierarchical, non-normative, respectful and grounded in mutual solidarity.
In short, what they refer to is a system that is collectively produced and radically opposed to autopoiesis as the prevailing strategy in the Western, male, white, heterosexual world. By invoking this paradigm, Muñoz succeeded in gathering the queer community around discourses about possible futures at a moment when queer world-making was in fact a utopian project. The failure of the enthusiasm surrounding the 1969 Stonewall uprising and the tragic impact of the AIDS pandemics actively obstructed the paths of hope. The queer community that developed around Derek Jarman’s final years was isolated and it has been mostly ignored until very recent times. It takes time to recover other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds (Muñoz 2009).
My contention here is that these new worlds are gradually being constructed in some narratives belonging to the field of speculative fiction. I’m thinking of novelists such as Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr. and Octavia Butler, and, more recently, Nalo Hopkinson, Nora K. Jemisin and Tlotlo Tsamaase. I will select passages and samples to show how the notion of queer community becomes a fertile ground to propose new ways of being together. Writing from different kinds of margins – racialized, sexualized or both – all of them contribute to the shaping of a different brand of critical utopianism, where hope exists in dialectical tension with its opposite, and yet the one cannot exist without the other. The aesthetic and the political are interwoven in the texture of a renewed kind of community.
Bio note
Nicoletta Vallorani is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Milan. She has published on colonialism and postcolonialism (Nessun Kurtz. Heart of Darkness e le parole dell’occidente, 2017), on urban geographies (Millennium London. Of Other Spaces and the Metropolis, 2012) and on the intersections between crime fiction and Migration Studies ('Postcolonising crime fiction. Some reflections on good and evil in global times', 2014). She contributed to The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction ('Crime Fiction and the Future', 2019). With Simona Bertacco, she co-authored a volume on translation and migration, prefaced by Homi K. Bhabha (The Relocation of Culture, 2021), and, with Simona Bertacco and William Boelhower, she is editing the Bloomsbury Handbook of Literature & Migration. She coordinates the project Docucity. Documenting the Metropolis, on documentary film making and urban geographies, and she co-directs the online journal Altre Modernità.
References
Bloch, Ernst. 2022. The Spirit of Utopia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Edelman, Lee. 2004. No future: queer theory and the death drive. Series Q. Durham: Duke University Press.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2016. Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Experimental futures: technological lives, scientific arts, anthropological voices. Durham: Duke University Press.
Keeling, Kara. 2020. Queer Times, Black Futures. New York University Press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814748329.001.0001.
Latham, Rob. 2010. «Sextrapolation in New Wave Science Fiction». In Queer Universes, edited by Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, e Joan Gordon, 1a ed., 52–71. Liverpool University Press. https://doi.org/10.5949/UPO9781846313882.004.
Lothian, Alexis. 2018. Old futures: speculative fiction and queer possibility. Postmillennial pop. New York: New York University Press.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Sexual Cultures. New York London: New York University Press.
Thibodeau, Amanda. 2012. «Alien Bodies and a Queer Future: Sexual Revision in Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” and James Tiptree, Jr’s "With Delicate Mad Hands». Science Fiction Studies, July 2012.