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This project addresses contemporary Italian women’s writing that conceptualizes queer subjects as complicating traditional notions of linear time, reproduction and progress. I put Romana Petri’s "Il Baleniere delle Montagne," Simona Vinci’s "Strada Provinciale Tre," Elvira Dones’s "Vergine Giurata," and Valeria Parrella’s "Lo Spazio Bianco" in dialogue with queer temporality studies. The first two decades of the twenty-first century saw a temporal turn in queer studies, with theorists and critics examining queer subjects and texts in relation to linear and circular time. This turn has tended to be concerned with how queer bodies might push against homogenous time. Those I focus on here are different to such oppositional temporalities. However, queer theorists of temporality have also been cautious about associating queer people with the non-linear. This thesis is influenced by the temporal turn generally, but more specifically by those who have focused on acknowledging the complexity of queering practices, gender identities and temporal/spatial circumstances. It is inspired by those who draw out the unsustainability of living one way or another. The return to the non-queer sex acts and identities does not eliminate theory’s ambitions, so much as expand its vision. The literary corpus offers analyses of the representations of the grieving mother, the wanderer, the sworn virgin and the mother-in-waiting positioned as queer not so much in terms of sexual orientation as in terms of their relation to temporality. In the “Introduction,” I summarize the social and political background of the Italian context, Italian feminist thought, and the media representations of feminine bodies during Silvio Berlusconi’s premiership. I offer a reading of Italy’s fertility campaign to show how the national time crisis is structured around feminine bodies in Italy. From chapter one to chapter four, I discuss how the mentioned authors utilize various types of traditionally gendered roles, spatial, and temporal qualities to articulate gender politics, to call into question heteronormative authority that confines their characters, and their so-called reproductive bodies. Reading these acts queerly, I devise ways to gain knowledge from women’s writing where sexual acts and identities are not mobilized to decode queerness.
The selected literary texts are populated with heterosexual identities, however their heterosexual acts do not contribute to heteronormative ideals of gendered roles, namely motherhood, reproductive bodies, and normative femininity. "Il Baleniere delle Montagne" starts with a death event and unravels the protagonist’s — Vera Mónica — permanent liminality in the face of her son’s death. Maria’s particular experience is mobilized to develop a temporal concept that I call “spatialized temporality” presented in the spatial settings of the novel: an island and a threshold. "Strada Provinciale Tre" provides an understanding of “emergent temporality” exercised in a highway where Vera embarks on a journey. Vera’s practice of walking leads to questions shaped around the gender of flâneur, caring practices, and the possibilities of forming relationalities with strangers instead of maintaining the status quo, namely bloodlines and familial stability as the protagonist leaves her family behind and terminates a pregnancy. "Vergine Giurata "helps to tease out the non-linear temporality of displacement as the protagonist is dislocated from her familiar identity in her homeland. This novel challenges the temporal stages of normative femininity, translation, and arrival in a destination country. The fourth chapter focuses on "Lo Spazio Bianco" and suspended qualities of time. I suggest that childbirth and motherhood do not necessarily invest in a hopeful future and generational continuity. Although the novels and the chapters have heterosexual attributes, they do not necessarily align with queer temporalities’ coupling of reproductivity with motherhood, heterosexuality, domesticity and traditional gender roles. Paying particular attention to the cultural workings of reproductive bodies, I focus on temporality, specifically on how regulations of time function to maintain intelligibility, as well as how these trajectories can be disrupted. Such disruptions do not necessarily occupy the timelines and hierarchies they inherit from the dominant culture they stem from. My project argues that the function of queer modes of belonging is to disrupt the notions of progress and reproduction which shape typical connections of life, death, birth and marriage. Temporal disruptions can foster queerly generative relationalities, thereby providing alternatives and challenges to normative temporal trajectories. |
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