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A Queer Reading of 1970s-1980s Italian Women's Writing -- From Madonna to Whore, or Femininity Undone -- The Fall of the Patriarch, or Masculinity Undone -- Queer Time: Overthrowing the Bourgeois, Reproductive Imperative -- Queer Space: Physical and Symbolical Dis/locations off the Normative Path -- Sexual Fluidity and Textual Hybridity in Autobiographical Women's Writing -- Conclusion. "QUEER(ING) GENDER IN ITALIAN WOMEN'S WRITINGS is the first study of its kind to systematically use queer theory as a theoretical framework of analysis in Italian literature in general, and in Italian women's writings in particular. Focusing especially on writers Dacia Maraini, Goliarda Sapienza and Elsa Morante, and restricting the field of enquiry to works written during the feminist years, this book relates the chosen texts to their historical and cultural backdrop and illustrates the way in which their authors responded to the debates of the day in matters of gender and sexuality in a most original manner, thereby coming closer to current 'queer' formulations. Inevitably, Judith Butler is a ubiquitous presence in the few existing critical contributions offering a 'queer' reading of texts pertaining to the Italian literary tradition - which seem to rely predominantly on the philosopher's theorisation of the performative quality of gender. Although drawing, too, on the Butlerian performative, Queer(Ing) Gender in Italian Women's Writings incorporates additional concepts that are key to Butler's notion of queer, such as 'parody', 'citationality', 'drag' and 'undoing gender'. But it also considers other influential queer theorists, namely Teresa de Lauretis, Judith Halberstam, Lee Edelman, Sara Ahmed and (the author's queer reading of) Julia Kristeva - both to enrich existing critical debates on Italian women's writings and in the belief that to restrict the plurality intrinsic to the formulation of 'queer' is, also, to limit its potential as a tool for critical inquiry"--
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