The clash in the year 2000 between the Catholic Church’s Jubilee and the Circolo Mario Mieli’s LGBT World Pride, which culminated in Pope John Paul II’s statement that the Pride was ‘un’offesa ai valori cristiani’, pays testament to a politics of space in Rome that aims to exclude and deny access to the city to those groups which are not considered part of the dominant and normalized notion of identity. This workshop, part of the ‘Roman Modernities’ AHRC network, attempts to challenge the dominant, exclusive, totalizing and universal idea of Rome, by shedding new light on its queer, subversive and less normative presences. The speakers will unite and challenge the subversive theoretical notions and figures that emerge in modern Rome’s cultural environment (from Pier Paolo Pasolini to Dario Bellezza, from Mario Mieli to Giò Stajano) with global queer theories (Freeman, Freccero and queer temporality, Edelman and futurity, hooks and race/gender) and readings of politicised space in Rome (cruising grounds, saunas, peripheries). By thinking through representations of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals, as well as notions of the closet or the implicitly queer in relation to Rome; by re-reading Rome’s modern cityscape as a field of tensions where non-normative identities are pushed into peripheral spaces of indistinction; and by mapping out the homosexual identity alongside Rome’s specifically late modernity, the workshop will create the space to consider a queer theory of Rome / Roman queer theory.

For any questions, or to register, please contact RomanModernities@gmail.com
go.warwick.ac.uk/Rome

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/italian/research/projects/romanmodernities/timetable/queeringrome/