Queering the southern border: challenges to Italian homonationalism in Emma Dante'sVia Castellana Bandiera(2013)

Abstract

Set in contemporary Palermo, Emma Dante's Via Castellana Bandiera (2013) offers a powerful exploration of the South as a site of cultural contact, interaction and confrontation by focusing on a western-like showdown between two women whose lives are differently marked by mobility and migration. In Dante's film, the simultaneous articulation of queerness and southernness is a way to queer the traditional image of the frontier and to offer an evocative elaboration on how identities are constructed, mobilised and played off against each other in the neoliberal context.

July 4, 1980

“…This vignette about the pool protest, aside from setting the date of its occurrence straight, is an attempt to provide an impressionistic reflection on the changing modus of trans experience from the location of South Europe, and an invitation to take such location seriously. Italy is historically a space of contacts and frontiers, of mobility and migration (Polizzi 2020), and of entangled temporalities of emancipation, as in the case of the once cutting-edge Law 164. Now that the law needs to be reformed, can plural forms of trans liberation be pursued not simply according to a northern understanding of the world, but to a "meridian perspective" (Cassano 1996)?…”