Prior to 1990, lesbian subjectivity and desire were certainly not major themes of Italian literature; nevertheless, rather than completely absent, they might be better qualified as the Derridean “absent presence”, or as the repressed unconscious of heteronormative society which surfaces despite censorship.11 This absent presence is exemplified clearly in one of the most sustained pre-1990 novelistic engagements with a lesbian relation-ship, Dacia Maraini’s Lettere a Marina (1989): Bianca, a writer, escapes to the coast for the summer to get over the end of her relationship with Marina, to whom she writes letters that may never be sent. The ‘L’ word is not used, the lesbian relationship is in the past, and in the present-tense action of the novel Bianca embarks on a fling with a male bar tender.
Aside from remaining specifically unarticulated, therefore, lesbianism is posited as ‘elsewhere’, in time, place and experience.
11 Earlier examples of lesbian-themed texts include Sibilla Aleramo, Lettere d’amore a Lina [Love-letters to Lina] (belatedly published in an edition by Ales -sandra Cenni in 1982) and Maria Volpi Nannipieri (Mura), Perfidie [Betrayals]
(1919). See also Danna for an analysis of lesbian-themed late-19th-century novels.
Moving forward, we can tentatively begin to identify a growing
‘canon’ of Italian lesbian literature—a term which we use with caution owing to the inherently problematic nature of the canon as a means of categorizing texts, but which seems justified in the light of the efforts of critics and authors in Italy. Indeed, the work of writers and critics such as Vaccarello and Giacobino has sought to identify, and make available to an Italian reading public, literature which engages with lesbian subjectivities.
As editor of the collections Principesse azzurre mentioned above, Vacca-rello has provided resources and opportunities that seek to counter the isolation that many lesbians complain of in contemporary Italian society, and to address the lack of positive cultural images of lesbian desire and experience (Olivieri and Santini: 48). These resources are both textual, in the form of the ‘further reading’ bibliographies provided in the Princi-pesse azzurre volumes, and interactive, via a series of gatherings to discuss new titles and literary themes.12 Similarly Giacobino has sought to make texts available through translation from English, and by giving lectures and seminar presentations. Aside from translating classic ‘lesbian texts’ such as Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (2004), she is editor of Officine T—Parole in corso, the foreign narrative series established by the Milanese feminist publishing house Il Dito e la Luna. The Milan-based feminist group Diotima has sought to construct a ‘genealogy of women’, to compile a frame of reference and excavate the silenced and undissemi-nated voices of women’s thought, looking beyond Italian linguistic and national boundaries to weave a polyvocal ‘transnational’ thread of com-mon issues and interests (herstories; see Cannon: 19-20); similarly, Il Dito e la Luna aims to construct a ‘genealogy’ for Italian lesbian communities through literary translation.13 Giacobino has also authored two texts which delineate ‘percorsi’ or routes that a reader might follow through a selec-tion of texts, both of which originate from public seminars: Orgoglio e privilegio. Viaggio eroico nella letteratura lesbica (2003) and Guerriere,
12 For example Vaccarello presented the second volume at the Feltrinelli bookshop in Bari in May 2005, as well as participating in other discussions as part of a series of initiatives for IDAHO, the International Day Against Homophobia:
see http://www.omofobia.it/iniziative/2005/index-city.html.
13 There is a volatile political context to this supplementary genealogy, since in the past Diotima has been accused of silencing lesbian subjectivities and therefore effectively abetting heterosexist society: a key illustration of this is the 1983 opening of the Libreria delle donne in Milan at which there was a discussion of the work of Adrienne Rich which omitted to mention her lesbianism. See Diotima.
ermafrodite, cortigiane. Percorsi trasgressivi della soggettività femminile in letteratura (2005).14
In the former, Giacobino draws on Lilian Faderman’s six categories of lesbian literature as set out in Chloe plus Olivia in 1995. While acknow-ledging that there is no ‘one’ lesbian literature and fully aware of the potentially reductive nature of this type of exercise, Faderman neverthe-less provides a provisional schema in an attempt to map the changes in literature that represents lesbian subjectivity. The themes she identifies are: amorous friendship; sexual inversion (a man trapped in woman’s body); the criminal/carnivorous lesbian; coded novels which silence les-bianism; Amazonian lesbo-feminists and post-lesbofeminist novels. Gia-cobino presents Faderman’s arguments for an Italian readership, giving extracts in translation of several Anglophone novels, but also weaving Italian texts into the model: for example, Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s 1992 Complice il dubbio [Bound by doubt] appears as a giallo whose silenced theme appears to be the “fear of lesbianism” (Giacobino 2003: 101);
Melania Mazzucco’s Il bacio della Medusa [The kiss of Medusa] (1996), Elena Stancanelli’s Benzina [Gasoline] (1998) and Fiorella Cagnoni’s Ar-senico [Arsenic] (2001) depict the ‘donna dannata’, or condemned wo-man, who must pay for her transgressions with death—a theme which can be traced back in Italian culture to Lombroso’s pathologization of lesbians and which, Giacobino argues (2003: 173) is more in evidence in Italian texts than, for example, in contemporary North American literature.15
On the one hand Giacobino implies that Italian literature needs to play
‘catch up’ to Anglophone cultural production; on the other she gestures to-wards an Italian tradition of the representation of lesbian subjectivity.
However, she limits herself largely to identifying “the made in Italy reti-cence regarding lesbianism” (2003: 99, original emphasis)—comparable to the lack of literary representation of gay male subjectivities identified by Pezzana, for example. It seems important to take these observations further and to explore the points of similarity and difference between recent Italian novels in order to more fully interrogate the relevance or
14 Orgoglio e privilegio [Pride and Privilege] grew out of workshops held in Turin, Milan and Genoa in 2001/02, at the request of the Centro Maurice in Turin (see:
http://mauriceglbt.org/html/modules/maurice/storia.php). Guerriere [Female War-riors] derives from a series of public lectures that Giacobino was invited to deliver by the Biblioteche Civiche Torinesi in 2004, with the support of the Equal Oppor -tunities and Gender Policy Division of the Città di Torino Educational Services Division.
15 For a discussion of Cesare Lombroso’s pseudo-scientific accounts of lesbian desire see Gibson.
otherwise of a category such as ‘lesbian literature’. When these novels are considered as a ‘group’—however loosely associated—two main themes emerge which relate to the “reticence” noted by Giacobino.