In my town, a pair of queer, Italian-American siblings regularly host farm-to-table dinners called Finocchi. I went to one on New Years Eve Eve, in the barn of a Christmas tree farm, where a rural, queer community gathered to eat stuffed muscles and fried calamari, and a goat that had been raised by local, queer farmers, and cooked for several days before being served falling off the bone. Before dining, one of our hosts shared their story of traveling through Italy, of finding themself in a salt mine dance party in Bologna, and discovering that there was a place where their queerness and Italianness could live together.
“There are niches, little spaces where you can see something else. Kind of that queer utopia of that other, possible world that maybe hasn’t been fully explored,” explains Danila Cannamela, an assistant professor of Italian studies at Colby College. “There is some space for encounter.” This is how she describes the project that she, and co-editors Marzia Maurillo and Summer Minerva, embarked on in the creation of the new anthology, Italian Trans Geographies (SUNY Press); it is a book that creates a space, like a dinner table, where encounters can occur. Through these encounters, readers can gain some understanding into the specific embodied experiences of Italian trans people.
“In academia there’s always a refrain… that every time you talk about trans studies you say that transness is beyond, but also across.” Thinking of trans experiences in this spatial language is what led the editors to frame the book as a geography. The collection moves from Southern Italy and up through the country to Bologna, before crossing the Atlantic and discussing Italian-American and Italian-Canadian diaspora. By focusing on geographies, the anthology is able to highlight the idea of transness as movement – through cultures, versions of the body, and versions of the self. “You can re-map the history of Italy with trans people at the center,” Cannamela asserts, “that’s totally possible.”
The book resists the idea that trans people have always lived on the margins of Italian life. A central interest of the book is the experience of the Feminielli, a Neopolitan third-gender that could, in a modern context, be understood through the lens of trans-femininity. The feminielli are a staple of traditional Neapolitan culture. They’re considered incredibly lucky, are responsible for calling the tombola (a bingo-esque game), and perform a number of pageant rituals, mocking and celebrating traditional coming-of-age events like the Spusarizio (wedding).
The experience of the feminielli complicates Western identity politics – throughout the book, the concern that the feminielli will go extinct as more contemporary people have access to a Western conception of being transgender is a common refrain. The tension between trans liberation and a globalized, Anglophone trans identity is a constant theme in the book. It comes up in the lived experiences of FtM community organizers in Bologna, and in the experiences of Italian-American queers seeking their identities as they traverse their family histories.
One of my favorite sections of the book, an excerpt Elements di critics trans (Elements of Trans Critique), transcribes a conversation at a conference concerning trans storytelling. Attendees explore the question by discussing their own experiences of gender, self-identification, and their opinions on the central elements of the trans experience. Again, rebellion against a globalized, monocultural trans identity comes up when attendee Lorenzo Bernini speaks:
“It’s important not to turn transsexuality and transgenderism into a new identity that, within a certain environment, runs the risk of becoming an imperialist experience and swallowing up experiences that were something else, because they were undergoing other forms of conditioning and didn’t have the support of a movement that, instead, exists today,” (175).
Of course, there are some transition experiences that do fit into the mold of the stereotypical trans story. The book features translated excerpts from important twentieth-century trans Italian memoirs, like that of Romina Cecconi, one of the fist transexual women in Italy to get bottom surgery. The excerpt marks an important point in the continuum of trans lives, but it also shows the narrative that so many trans people feel pressure to embody. Italian Trans Geographies does the elegant job of presenting texts like this in their context and grounding the reader in an understanding of the impact they would have had in their time. This reverence and respect for the experience of previous generations gives the book even more space to complicate those expected narratives, and create more space for divergence from the script.
A large portion of the book is dedicated to English translations of writing by Porpora Marcasciano, a celebrated Italian trans writer and activist. This volume contains some of the first writing by Marcasiano available in English (one of her memoirs, AntoloGaia (AntholoGay) was translated by Francesco Pascuzzi and Sandra Waters, and published by Rutgers University Press in 2023). When I think about Popora, my heart grows in size. Popora’s published a number of memoirs and other non-fiction, and in Italian Trans Geographies, her writing provides a grounding through line as the Italian Trans community defines their fight for liberation in the late-20th and early-21st centuries. Another fabulous chapter in the book analyzes photographs of Popora taken by her lifelong friend Lina Pallotta. “She self defines as the Bard of the trans movement,” Cannamela explains, “She has the function of performing their stories.”
As the book resists the normative narratives, it also resits any kind of normative assumptions about what kind of writing is valuable. Italian Trans Geographies collects academic essays and writings, but also features poetry, personal narratives, transcripts from interviews and conferences, photography, film criticism, etc. As the book contains many types of information, it is part of a tapestry of other media and experiences currently being offered to explore Italian Queerness. Summer Minerva, one of the book’s editors, has made a beautiful documentary called Summer Within, a biographical film that documents Summer as they discover their connection to the feminielli from an Italian-American perspective. And Finocchi pop ups happen all over the country…
“The journey of finding my people inside of my ancestral tradition was a search for belonging,” Minerva writes, in one of their essays that appears in the book, “[and] belonging is a gift that we give to each other and permission that we give to ourselves.” By mapping the vast spaces that Italian trans lives take up, Italian Trans Geographies offers readers – those who share both, either, or none of the identities in the title – an opportunity to consider the making of their belonging. It is an exciting book that could enrich any bookshelf – and it’s relatively expensive, so be sure to request it at your local library so that more copies can be in circulation.
