This contributed volume brings together personal accounts and scholarly research in an examination of the LGBTQIA+ Italian American experience and representation in North American media. This is a population that has long been ignored both as an object of study and as a media-maker and consumer. Through consistent filmic representation, the image of the Italian American has become archetypal, leaving us with a set of immediately recognizable characters: the hyper macho blue-collar greaser, the anti-intellectual GTL Guido, the child-obsessed mamma, and the heteronormative mafia family. The rhetorical and literal loudness of these characters drowns out other possible embodiments of Italian American identity so that few examples survive of Italian Americans that do not conform to these classed, heterosexual modes of being. This volume fills that void, foregrounding the importance of representation and of rethinking the historical narratives and cultural stereotypes surrounding Italian American identity. This book is especially designed for those with an interest in queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, Italian American studies, and media and cultural studies.
Author(s): Julia Heim, Sole Anatrone
Series: Italian and Italian American Studies
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 295
City: Cham
Mixed Blessing
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Becoming Italian American
Media’s Making of Italian Americans
Representing the Intersection
Mediating Meaning
Works Cited
Chapter 2: Queering the Kitchen: Cultural Friction at the Italian American Table
Works Cited
Chapter 3: Spotlight: Annie Rachele Lanzillotto
The Hyphen
Chapter 4: Pulp Up the Volume: Race, Sexuality, and Diaspora in The Invisible Glass (1950) And Confetti for Gino (1959)
The (Not So) Secret Life of Pulp Fiction
Dangerous Liaisons in Black and White with Shades of Gray
Part 1: The Queer Plot
Part 2: The Straight Plot
Invisibilities That B(l)ind: Some Concluding Remarks
Works Cited
Chapter 5: Spotlight: Dana Piccoli
Chapter 6: Queer Categorical Miscegenation: Sexuality, Race, Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Victor Bumbalo’s Niagara Falls and Questa
Introduction
Italians, Queers, and Brownness
Niagara Falls: We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re Going to an Italian Wedding
Are/Were Italian Americans Brown?
The Shangri-La Motor Inn: My Gay Bestie
The Primitive Gay White Male
Questa and The Dignified Black Queen
Coercive Mimeticism and Spoiled Identities
“Dark” Fantasies: Categorical Miscegenation and S/M
Concluding Thoughts
Works Cited
Chapter 7: Spotlight: Katelynn Cusanelli
Chapter 8: “I Would Like to be a Spoiled, Rich, White Girl”: Trans Genealogy, (Self-)Naming and the Entombed Italian American Subjectivity of Venus Xtravaganza
The Ethnic Naming of Venus Xtravaganza
Deadnaming and The Stakes for Trans Biography
The Politics of (Self-)Naming
Genealogy and Media
Appendix
Works Cited
Chapter 9: Spotlight: Norman Korpi
Chapter 10: Lifestyles of the Gay and Mobster
Friends & Family
Alto
Flamboyant Finooks and Excessive Italians
Works Cited
Chapter 11: Spotlight: Mitch Del Monico
Chapter 12: Queering the Guido or Guidoing the Queer? Performing Gender and Identity on Comedy Television
Performing Masculinity
Creating Queer Space Through Comedy
The Family as Means to Laughter
Laughing Out of the Closet
Queering the Guido or Guidoing the Queer?
Works Cited
Chapter 13: Spotlight: Julio “Giulio” Vincent Gambuto
Chapter 14: “Time to Come Out, Girl!”: Queering Italian American Sexuality on TV Land’s Younger
Younger’s Queer and Italian-American Paratexts
From Anthony Marantino to Maggie Amato: Queer Italian American Friends on Mainstream Television
“I’m the Garlic Knot”: Maggie’s Eccentricity From Bottom to Top, Inside and Out
“Two Worlds Coming Together”: Maggie’s Mésalliances
“The Shiksa in the Mikveh”: Maggie’s Profanations
Conclusions: Putting Queer Italian American Identities on the Map
Works Cited
Chapter 15: Spotlight: Laura Fedele & Rita Houston
Index
