Un/Doing Queerness in the European South: Trans*ition/Migration/Borders
Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing
Speakers:
Alberica Bazzoni (Università per Stranieri di Siena)
Mariza Avgeri (Open University)
Alberica Bazzoni (Università per Stranieri di Siena), ‘Undoing Italy with Ferrante, Sapienza, Scego, and Lahiri: Transnational Approaches to Contemporary Literature in Italian’
In this contribution, I start from the global success of Elena Ferrante’s tetralogy The Neapolitan Novels to sketch an alternative configuration of contemporary Italian literaturebased on a transnational approach. I place Ferrante next to three case studies of transnational success (Goliarda Sapienza), postcolonial narrative (Igiaba Scego) and translingual authorship (Jumpa Lahiri) that undo the boundaries of a national canon. Taken together, I argue, these authors reveal and institute difference at the very heart of Italian identity. Reflecting on diverging methodologies and disciplinary confines at play in canon formation in Italian Studies in Italy and in Anglophone academia, I foreground the categories of trauma, gender, translingualism, and narrative pathos (de Rogatis 2023) as central to the definition of a transnational corpus of contemporary literature in Italian.
Mariza Avgeri (Open University), ‘Towards a Decolonizing Framework for Centering the Experiences of Trans and Queer Migrants and Refugees’
In this presentation, I reflect on two interviews of transgender/gender nonconforming asylum claimants in Greece, the southern border of Europe. Drawing on the reflections of a non-binary person and a transgender woman, Ilios and Christina, I explore the difficulties of talking about the transgender/gender nonconforming experience as a non-Western migrant given the colonization of the trans and refugee rights discourse with Western human rights meta-narratives. In order to reflect on the experiences of transgender/gender nonconforming asylum applicants and their transition from their country of origin to the West, and to encompass non-Western migrant subjectivities into our current thinking on sexuality/gender, we need a decolonizing intersectional and antiessentialist discourse that is based in Queer and Trans studies. In this context, I explore the decolonization of gender identity/expression in refugee law and the theoretical underpinnings of Trans and Queer studies, and how they complement each other in order to voice and accommodate the subjectivities of trans and queer non-Western migrants and refugees. The critique to queer theory from the field of transgender studies will be outlined, moving to a framework that normalizes non-normative genders and validates their social location and identity position exposing the gender ideology that patholologizes them. Intersectionality perspectives will be presented in order to affirm the multiple identity positions that transgender migrants and refugees occupy and the need for them to belong to a particular category in order to engage in ‘group politics’ beyond the anti-identitarian theorization of queer theory. Furthermore, the argument will be made for a more narrative approach on gender identity construction that encompasses the reflective, culture-specific and interpretative nature of identity building, that can be applied in asylum interviews. Finally, I will problematize the epistemology employed in approaching transgender phaenomena in the context of migration, exploring feminist accounts of knowledge production, namely positionality and antiessentialism which provide tools to better conceptualize truth claims that arise in the study of trans asylum.
Date of event: 14 May 2024