Are Italians Brown? Categorical Miscegenation and Early Twentieth Century Italian Homosexuality

Abstract: Recent critical race theory suggests that, in the modern period, categories of race, gender, nation, and sexuality are mutually constitutive and largely indistinguishable. This essay explores the historical co-constitution of Italian racial identity and homosexuality in several works of literature from the early twentieth century, one written in English, the others, in Italian. In […]

Read More…

Queer Black Italy and the Politics of Experience

I recently took an invaluable and enlightening course designed to help instructors add material on Italians of African descent — or what is increasingly called Black Italy—to the Italian Studies curriculum. The course was a rich resource of information on many aspects of Black Italy, from its history to its presence in contemporary culture. In […]

Read More…

Queer #me too NYTimes

Like many men, in light of the #metoo movement, I have been led to reexamine my own sexual history. But as someone whose typical partners have been men, the stakes are different. For, according to one thread of #metoo’s logic, when I examine my conscience, I have to reimagine myself as both predator and prey, […]

Read More…

Queer #me too

In light of the #metoo movement, I have been, like many men, re-visiting my own sexual history. But because I identify as queer, the stakes are different. For, according to one thread of #metoo’s logic, when I examine my conscience, I have to reimagine myself as both predator and prey, groomer and groomed. The idea […]

Read More…

Trans-Parentela

I’m in Italy for the summer, and my friends on facebook tend to be pretty queer-friendly, so apparently I have been missing some kind of media (social and mass) frenzy around Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair Annie Leibovitz photo shoot. Laverne Cox has rightly worried about the fetishizing of trans beauty; obviously, we haven’t made the […]

Read More…

“Beleaguered” Queer White Male

Some writers have a rule: never write anything negative about another scholar’s work. Some have another: never answer your critics. I was recently accused of having “race fatigue.” The specific charge, leveled against Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Joan Scott, and me, was directed toward our various critiques of the category of experience, the way the […]

Read More…