italy 11 (2025) – Table of Contents

December 22, 2025 Issue: g/s/i 11 (2025) Category: Contents, Editorials, Themed Section, Invited Perspectives, Open Contributions, Continuing Discussions, Reviews, Videos

Nicoletta Marini-Maio, Journal Editor, Continuing Discussions Editor
Paola Bonifazio, Invited Perspectives Editor
Ellen Nerenberg, Open Contributions Editor
Alice Parrinello, Guest Editor
Leonardo Cabrini, Erica Moretti, and Colleen Ryan, Reviews Editors
Guido Capaccioli, Lisa Dolasinki, and Samantha Gillen, Managing Editors
Beatrice Basile, Matthew Guyton-Docherty, Deion Dresser, Mattia Mossali, Francesca Passaseo, Nicolò Salmaso, and Katherine Travers, Assistant Editors
Sofia-Teresa Di Bacco, Student Assistant

Table of Contents
Journal Editorial

ALICE PARRINELLO,

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New Queer South. Journal Editorial

A. Parrinello, P. Bonifazio, N. Marini-Maio, E. Nerenberg December 22, 2025 Issue: g/s/i 11 (2025) Category: Contents, Editorials, Themed Section

Journal Editorial by Alice Parrinello (Guest Editor), Nicoletta Marini-Maio (General Editor, Continuing Discussions Editor), Ellen Nerenberg (Open Contributions Editor)

The editorial includes the Guest Editor’s and Editors’ introductions to their respective areas.

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1.Genere, sessualità e Meridione: Verso una mappatura politica e teorica del meridionalismo queer

Valentina Amenta December 22, 2025 Issue: g/s/i 11 (2025) Category: Themed Section

by Valentina Amenta

This article introduces Queer Meridionalist Thought as a theoretical and political framework for interrogating the colonial and cis-heteropatriarchal world-system. By critically re-signifying the 20th-century Southern Question discourse, this perspective seeks to reconceptualize Southern Italy through feminist and queer methodologies, situating itself within broader decolonial and postcolonial debates. The article outlines the core tenets of Queer Meridionalist Thought, mapping key scholarly contributions alongside the emergence of political and cultural actors in Italy.

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2.Tutto cambia affinché tutto cambi: Meridione, politica e nazione ne L’arte della gioia

Carla Panico December 22, 2025 Issue: g/s/i 11 (2025) Category: Themed Section

by Carla Panico

This paper examines Goliarda Sapienza’s L’arte della gioia as a decolonial intervention in the “colonial representations” of Southern Italy, which often frame the Mezzogiorno as politically immobile and fatally resistant to self-organization. Defined as the AntiGattopardo, the novel challenges these stereotypes by reimagining Southern identity through the body, desire, and dissent. Its protagonist, Modesta, embodies a refusal of normative gender roles tied to Italian nationalism and engages in forms of militancy that unsettle both the national narrative and the boundaries of citizenship.

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3.Naples, Sexual Diversity and Self-Orientalism: Femminielli as a Case Study

Marco Ruggieri December 22, 2025 Issue: g/s/i 11 (2025) Category: Themed Section

by Marco Ruggieri

This article examines the figure of the femminiello, a complex sexual identity rooted in the Naples area and now gradually disappearing. It challenges the common claim that femminielli have always been accepted within Neapolitan society—one often framed as liminal and in opposition to North-Western hegemony. The femminielli’s very existence has frequently been cited as proof of Southern Italy’s (Naples’ in particular) supposed innate inclusivity.

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4.I Femminielli: A Gender Variant Existence Between Sacred and Profane in the City of Naples

Jules De Bellis December 22, 2025 Issue: g/s/i 11 (2025) Category: Themed Section

by Jules De Bellis

The femminielli are both gender non-conforming people and traditional entities of the city of Naples. They could be described as effeminate men who live and feel like women and who practise forms of sex labour, but not necessarily. The femminiello identity intersects the concepts of homosexuality, transvestism and transgenderism and contextually transcend their meaning. This paper analyses the coexistence of both sacred (Madonna) and profane (Whore) archetypes in the characterization of the Neapolitan femminielli.

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5.Spiritual Hotbeds:(Counter)Narratives of HIV/AIDS in Sicily

Leonardo Campagna December 22, 2025 Issue: g/s/i 11 (2025) Category: Themed Section

by Leonardo Campagna

If we conceive of the Southern Question as an interpretative key to analyze contemporary history and politics, we realize that Italian LGBTQ+ historiography has hardly addressed the South. Through archival research and textual analysis, this paper proposes Sicily as a case study in the investigation of narratives on HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, with particular focus on the representation of body, sexuality, space, and serostatus. The first part examines media coverage of the AIDS crisis in Sicily,

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6.The Southern Queer Poetics of June Scialpi: Obliquity, Conflict, Magic

Marzia D'Amico December 22, 2025 Issue: g/s/i 11 (2025) Category: Themed Section

by Marzia D’Amico

June Scialpi’s poetry embodies a poetics of queerness and Southerness, intertwining marginalized identities, historical inheritances, and the fluidity of selfhood. Her work resists dominant cultural narratives by contesting patriarchal structures and advocating for an identity shaped through relationality, vulnerability, and transformation. This study examines how her engagement with themes of conflict and magic reframes the queer subject through a Southern Italian lens, where ritual and myth provide an alternative to normative frameworks of identity.

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7.A Queer Perspective on the Italian South? Some Methodological Notes; or, How to Read as a Southern Queer

Goffredo Polizzi December 22, 2025 Issue: g/s/i 11 (2025) Category: Invited Perspectives

by Goffredo Polizzi

This article develops a queer methodology to rethink Southern Italy by examining the intertwined histories of Italian emigration and colonialism, focusing on their gendered and sexualized dimensions. Challenging nationalist narratives, it foregrounds marginalized identities and destabilizes binaries such as Italian/foreigner and insider/outsider. By connecting internal and external colonial memories through a transnational lens, the approach engages with contemporary Italy’s migrant realities and social transformations. It offers a critical framework that fosters solidarity and deepens understandings of Southern Italy’s past,

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8.Within and Beyond the Queer Italian South: A Conversation with Francesca Romana Ammaturo

F.R. Ammaturo, P. Bonifazio, A. Parrinello December 22, 2025 Issue: g/s/i 11 (2025) Category: Invited Perspectives

by Francesca Romana Ammaturo, Paola Bonifazio and Alice Parrinello

This conversation explores Dr. Francesca Romana Ammaturo’s practice, stemming from her work on queerness in Apulia. It tackles key questions related to a new understanding of queerness in the South, such as the politics of (un)detectability, activism, the tension between being an insider/outsider, and tourism. At the same time, it touches upon academia, its taxonomizing tendencies, its contribution to activism, and its potential acts of critical fabulation.

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