JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy)

Queering America Today

Francesco Bacci, Emanuele Monaco, Chiara Patrizi — Fri, 31 May 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Queering American History

Emanuele Monaco — Fri, 31 May 2024 00:00:00 +0200

In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage. Transgender evangelist Jemima Wilkinson, in the early 1800s, changed her name to “Public Universal Friend,” refused to use pronouns, fought for gender equality, and led her own congregation in upstate New York. In the mid-nineteenth century, internationally famous Shakespearean actor Charlotte Cushman led an openly lesbian life, including a well-publicized “female marriage.” And in the late 1920s, Augustus Granville Dill was fired by W. E. B. Du Bois from the NAACP’s magazine the Crisis after being arrested for a homosexual encounter. These are just a few moments of queer stories that fill what we call U.S or American history.

But what does it mean to queer American history? How might queering it move us to ask new and different questions about it, regardless of whether we write about intimacy, eros, sexuality or love? If early scholarship chronicled the exploits of queer-identified people over time for an audience already open to the history of sexuality, the contemporary methodological struggle is aiming to suggest ways in which queering history might aid us in thinking more critically about how conventions, ideals, norms and, above all, practices gain traction and resonance in our history writing.

To queer history rather than just writing histories of queerly situated or queer-identified people is to draw on a wide array of conceptual tools—often from other disciplines—to lay bare common assumptions about the world in which our subjects lived. It means stepping away from the family album approach and adding new layers of complexity to a shared historical past.

This essay, in the spirit of decades’ worth of scholarship that sees queer as much as a methodological intervention as an epithet, sketches out: the way queer history has been defined by academia and the issues and limits that emerged from research and scholarship; what it means to queer our common understanding of American history; where queer history gets its fuel, the archive, what it means to reconstruct and preserve the memory of discriminated and written off communities and individuals.

Subverting Same-Sex Couples’ Equal Dignity

Anthony Castet — Fri, 31 May 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Justice Anthony Kennedy has ascertained a strand of jurisprudence articulated around the concept of “equal dignity”, enshrined in the equal protection clause and the promise of “liberty” guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. However, in their dissents, originalist justices have framed marriage equality as a way to shift the burden of discrimination onto religious conservatives who claim their right not to recognize LGBTQ+ citizens by invoking religious freedom (First Amendment) and direct democracy.

Although it is early to determine whether the court will be poised to overturn key precedents, I would like to argue that the recent flux of religious domination has enabled Donald Trump to restore the moral uplift of the federal judiciary, which could potentially undermine Kennedy’s legacy. Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump has equipped himself with all the tools to hold the leverage he needs to launch a moral crusade against women’s reproductive rights or transgender Americans by denying them equal protection against “sex” discrimination and gender-affirming care under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

By referring to Lawrence (2003), in dissent, I aim to explore the interpretive foundations of Justice Scalia’s opinion, which has paved the way for a possible path to accommodate Americans’ “sincerely held religious beliefs”. Similarly, in Masterpiece Cakeshop (2018), Kennedy’s failed attempt to draw a fine line between sexual orientation discrimination and religious freedom on narrow grounds has empowered conservative Christians to claim the right to ignore the symbolic value of same-sex marriages.

Let Me Get this Queer

Daniele Atza — Fri, 31 May 2024 00:00:00 +0200

The purpose of this paper is to examine how older queer identities are represented in the contemporary American sitcom Grace and Frankie (2015 – 2022). By watching this TV show through the work on the depiction of sexuality in American family sitcoms provided by Tison Pugh in his book The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom (2018), this paper argues that different, unsung queer realities are starting to get more recognition in the U.S. television system. Grace and Frankie’s political statement of “being queer and in my 70s” and Pugh’s theoretical framework on the representation of queerness in U.S. television, are the tools this paper uses to analyze how a contemporary American comedy show deals with the intersection of age and sexuality.

The Trope of Africanism to Address Homosexuality in Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Francesca Scaccia — Fri, 31 May 2024 00:00:00 +0200

In the preamble to the Declaration of Independence “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” are described as being unalienable rights of people and moreover, they constitute the core of the American national ethos: ‘the American Dream’. Nevertheless, full access to the plenty of potentialities inherent in this rhetoric seems to have been denied to specific categories of people, thus resulting in an endorsement of exclusivity and discrimination, when actually it should have supported inclusivity and equal opportunities to every American citizen. Especially the notion of “liberty” has historically been influenced by many socially constructed categories in the US, notably race, religious belief, gender, and sexual orientation. Therefore, the connected conceits of ‘life’ and ‘the pursuit of happiness’ couldn’t help but be reshaped by those categorizations. This despicable state of things had such a profound impact on the life and works of many authors – especially on those who closely faced an unjust set of domination and discrimination due to their ethnicity and sexuality that they publicly condemned how suffocating and hypocritical American society still was in the twentieth century. Among them stands the influential African American writer James Baldwin, a figure in which one can really feel the struggle of being labelled as both African American and homosexual by the hypochondriac white society of the US. In his second novel entitled Giovanni’s Room (1956), Baldwin deeply explored the theme of the ‘quest for self-identity’ in connection with the theme of sexual orientation. Thus, the aim of this paper is to investigate how – and why – Baldwin makes use of Africanist, or Africanlike, characters (e.g., the Italian immigrant Giovanni) to explore topics that otherwise would have been taboo, which means homosexuality and even bisexuality in the American society of the 1950s. In particular, the analysis will rely on the seminal work of literary criticism Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), by Toni Morrison, who greatly examined the peculiar use of black characters in American literature for the first time.

(Re-)Narrating Transgender Pasts, Presents, and Futures in Casey Plett's Little Fish

Steph Berens — Fri, 31 May 2024 00:00:00 +0200

In Casey Plett’s novel Little Fish (2018), the protagonist Wendy faces multiple lifechanging events at the same time: After her grandmother passes away, she finds out that her Mennonite grandfather might have been a trans woman and grapples with the way her family has narrativized him and remembers him. In the midst of this journey, her friend Sophie dies by suicide and Wendy is left to piece together Sophie’s past, navigate a present of mourning, and imagine a future without her. Building on theories of queer and trans temporalities, Kit Heyam’s recent work on trans histories, Susan Stryker’s Foucauldian reading of trans as a subjugated archive, and Margaret Middleton’s concept of ‘gaydar as epistemology,’ this paper explores how cisnormative narrations of transness and transitioning hold trans subjectivities in a constant temporal bind and, in turn, how Little Fish interrogates this bind through a (re-)narration of transgender pasts, presents, and futures. The temporal bind within cisnormative temporalities and narrations of transness is rooted in medicalization and pathologization and configures trans identity as a temporary phase on a linear transitioning path from a traumatic childhood in the past to the ‘curing’ of a ‘wrong body’ in the future. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that Little Fish is able to challenge the cisnormative narrative by desubjugating trans archives and utilizing specific, embodied knowledge of transness to come to an interpretation of the past that negates presupposed heterosexuality and cisnormativity, and instead opens the possibility for the complexity of queer and trans existence.

“Was This Garden, then, the Eden of the Present World?”

Nicolo Salmaso — Fri, 31 May 2024 00:00:00 +0200

This article examines the concepts of historical accuracy and truthfulness of the setting in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) through an analysis of his representation and depiction of Padua, in particular of its University and Botanical Gardens (Orto Botanico). Though Hawthorne had not yet visited Italy at the time of publication, his description of Padua in the tale is vivid and full of apt references that embody the city. Overall, little critical attention has been devoted to the Padua setting of the short story. However, a study of Hawthorne’s rich and accurate references in the text reveals a somewhat obscure desire to convey his particularly deep knowledge of Italian literature, art, and history. Finally, a comparison between the Padua of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” with subsequent depictions of Italy in Hawthorne’s production, especially the Rome of The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni (1860), will highlight similarities and differences in the treatment of history and setting in his later works.

Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies

Pilar Martinez Benedi — Fri, 31 May 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Cody Marrs, Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies: An Aesthetics of All Things. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, pp. 148, ISBN: 9780192871725. Reviewedby Pilar Martínez Benedí