Tools
Tools
Ammaturo, Francesca Romana (2025) Queering Southern Italy: towards a conceptualisation of ‘Meridian Sexualities’. Sociological Review. ISSN 1467-954X
This article critically interrogates the expectations connected to the presence or absence of queerness in Southern Italy from a theoretical perspective, advancing the concept of ‘Meridian Sexualities’ as a tool that can be deployed from within the Italian South to think about its own queer histories and experiences, beyond the existing ‘cultural hegemony’ of the Italian North that has historically invisibilised, exoticised or essentialised them. This concept explicitly borrows from the work of Southern Italian sociologist Franco Cassano on ‘il Pensiero Meridiano’ (‘Meridian Thought’) and suggests that the emergence of ‘Meridian Sexualities’ can be achieved through ‘de-Northing’ knowledge production about the queer Italian South; subverting existing stereotypes on queerness in Southern Italy; and lastly through the reshaping of queer Italian pasts that have been forgotten or are missing from the archives, through the production of cultural artefacts. This article contributes to the sociology of gender and sexuality, particularly in relation to the existing hegemonic/subaltern relations within the Global North, showing the key role that these relations play in the definition of Northern and Southern European sexual and gender modernities.
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