This monograph demonstrates the happy marriage between queer theory and selected works of Dacia Maraini, Goliarda Sapienza, and Elsa Morante vis-á-vis the insights it affords into gender identity and its intersections with (biological) sex, the body, sexuality, and desire. Each serves the other well, with the texts illuminating the theory and the theory bringing to light new textual aspects or allowing more sophisticated and more complete interpretations of aspects examined in previous criticism. Morelli's systematic application of queer theory as a literary critical tool shows how three women writers so diverse in life histories, ideas and ideologies (Morante and Sapienza were not supporters of feminism), writing styles, and chronology of output exhibit similar concerns and a similar approach to gender that depart from the pensiero della differenza sessuale, the Italian feminist philosophy that theorised an essential female difference originating in the body. This philosophy, which emerged alongside equality feminism during the 1970s and 1980s, namely when the selected works were written or published, has been used extensively to interpret post-1968 Italian women's writing in the wake of Lazzaro-Weis's 1993 pioneering study From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women's Writings (1968–1990).
Morelli argues that, in creating characters who feel ill at ease in normative categories of gender and sexual identity and who are immersed in non-hegemonic multi-layered situations, dis/located spaces, and non-linear temporalities, Maraini, Sapienza, and Morante challenge the female-male binary and the imperatives of heterosexuality and reproduction that sustain patriarchal societies and subtend feminist thought of difference despite the latter's aim to dismantle current concepts of femininity. In doing so, their works advocate more fluid and becoming subjectivities and ways of living that are akin to the concept of ‘queer’ and anticipate key tenets of queer theory. While acknowledging the recent expansion of ‘queer’ into many theoretical discourses, Morelli restores the concept to the realm of sexual identity, connoting non-binary, non-heteronormative, transient, and always in-process identities. The bracketed gerund ‘queer(ing)’ in the monograph's title encapsulates all of the above.
The monograph is structured thematically and consists of six substantial chapters subdivided into sections, with an initial theoretical chapter and five analytical chapters each offering close readings of the texts of all three authors from a different angle: Chapter 1: A Queer Reading of 1970s–1980s Italian Women's Writing; Chapter 2: From Madonna to Whore, or Femininity Undone; Chapter 3: The Fall of the Patriarch, or Masculinity Undone; Chapter 4: Queer Time: Overthrowing the Bourgeois, Reproductive Imperative; Chapter 5: Queer Space: Physical and Symbolical Dis/locations off the Normative Path; Chapter 6: Sexual Fluidity and Textual Hybridity in Autobiographical Women's Writing.
In the short Introduction and Chapter 1, Morelli provides an apt outline of the writers, their beliefs and their work, and an articulate and informative discussion of her theoretical framework, including an overview of the philosophy of difference and the problematic reception of queer theory in Italy, her methodology, and her corpus of writings. The theoretical discussion, where Butler and De Lauretis dominate, focuses on the hiatus between the (strategic) essentialism that lurks in the theory of difference, with Cavarero and Braidotti being called upon to defend it from this charge, and a deconstructive queer theory which aims to expose the social mechanisms of repetition (performativity) through which gender is normalised, to undo male-female binarism, and to elide gender categorisations in favour of fluid subjectivities. This debate is reprised in the analytical chapters, especially Chapters 2 and 3 on femininity and masculinity. Ahmed and Halberstam provide the theoretical apparatus for the exploration of, respectively, queer space and queer time. Perhaps reflecting Maraini's and Sapienza's more pressing ‘queer’ concerns as evidenced by their also being frequently expressed outside their work ‒ Morelli's sources include correspondence from Sapienza's archive and her conversations with Sapienza's widower and with Maraini ‒ a number of their works have been selected for analysis compared to only one by Morante: Maraini's Donna in guerra, Storia di Piera, and Lettere a Marina; Sapienza's L'arte della gioia, Io, Jean Gabin, L'università di Rebibbia, and Le certezze del dubbio; and Morante's Aracoeli.
It would be impossible to summarise here the results of Morelli's investigation. She builds upon previous feminist criticism, showing how, itself upholding the male-female binary, it does not deal, or does so unsatisfactorily, with the texts’ critiques of ideas current at the time, and how a queer lens remedies these shortcomings. The chapters seamlessly interweave theory, the authors’ life experiences within their personal, familial, and socio-political and cultural contexts, their views on gender and feminism, the views on the same that emerge from the texts, and how the texts disrupt stylistic norms and established literary genres. The literary aspects gain full visibility in Chapter 6, which provides a lucid synthesis of the problematic categorisation of autobiography/autobiographical writing (May, Gusdorf, Doubrovsky, Lejeune) and an in-depth analysis of the ‘queering’ of first-person narrative our writers conduct in their own hybrid revisions of the ‘epistolary (lesbian) romance’ (p. 224), prison literature, and the Bildungsroman.
Morelli concludes that her chosen writers do not eschew the body and female experience, neither ideologically nor formally and stylistically, but they are original and ahead of their times because they ‘expose the mechanisms of power played upon [them]’ (p. 3) and explore the possibilities of moving beyond restrictive gender categories. However, while Sapienza and Maraini progress from exposing the ‘performativities of gender and sexuality as disciplining forces’ to imagining ‘alternative familial and social arrangements’ which permit ‘new ways of being and relating to others’ (pp. 260–261), Morante does not, presenting a protagonist that fulfils neither the script of masculinity nor that of homosexuality and thus remains a socially unviable subject. As women have had to contend with a literary tradition that did not represent them since they started to enter the writing profession in greater numbers in late nineteenth-century Italy, Morelli's joint engagement with Sapienza's, Morante's and Maraini's conceptual departures and stylistic and generic fractures furthers our understanding of the experimentalism of Italian women writers.
Morelli's endeavour in this monograph is conciliatory: she points out connections and disconnections between feminist theory and queer theory ‒ and the debts of the latter to the former ‒ and develops a productive literary critical methodology that incorporates both. It is hoped that this methodology will be taken further by other critics and applied to other works by these three authors, and especially Morante, whose work has been curtailed here to Aracoeli, and more widely to Italian women's writing in which queer themes are both explicit and covert.
This is an original, rich, and lucidly argued book of criticism. It will be an important addition to the scholarship on Maraini, Sapienza, and Morante for the use of academics, researchers, postgraduate and undergraduate students of Italian and other literatures and of comparative literature, who will find in it a valuable theoretical, methodological, and critical paradigm to follow.
