"This Town Is Against Gender": Bending Gender in Italian Culture
Abstract
Valeria Gennero
University of Bergamo
Italy
“This Town Is Against Gender”: Bending Gender in Italian Culture
This essay describes the misrepresentation of gender theory in Italian culture and politics, arguing that the violence of the attacks unleashed against gender in Italy constitutes a paradoxical example of the importance of a category of analysis that in today’s United States has come to be represented as tame (and even tedious).
Keywords
gender studies; war against gender; gender-bending; American gender studies; Italian gender studies; approaches to gender; gender stereotypes
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Dipartimento di Lingue, letterature straniere e comunicazione UNIVERSITA' DEGLI STUDI DI BERGAMO Italy
Valeria Gennero is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Bergamo. She has published widely on 20th century women’s writing and on feminist literary theory. Her books include La conquista dell’Est (2008), a study of Pearl S. Buck’s fiction and La manomissione del genere (2015), which analyzes recent developments in queer theory and literature. In 2013 she edited the collection of essays Soggetti cerebrali. Le scienze umane nell’età neurocentrica.
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