Queer Italia gathers essays on Italian literature and film, medieval to modern. The volume's chronological organization reflects its intention to define a queer tradition in Italian culture. While fully cognizant of the theoretical risks inherent in trans-historicizing sexuality, the contributors to this volume share an interest in probing the multi-form dynamics of sexual desires in Italian texts through the centuries. The volume aims not to promote the mistaken notion of a single homosexuality through history. Rather, these essays together upset and undo the equally misguided assumption of an omnipresent heterosexuality through time by uncovering the various, complex workings of desire in texts from all periods. Somewhat paradoxically, a kind of queer canon results. These essays open a much-needed critical space in the Italian tradition wherein fixed definitions of sexual identity collapse. Queer Italia is the first and only work of its kind in Italian criticism. As such, it will be of interest to a wide audience of Italianists, medieval to modern, and queer cultural theorists.

Given Italian culture's machismo and worship of Roman Catholic views of sexuality, a book on the queer aspects of Italian culture should be more than controversial

Introduction Queer Italia: Same-sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film; G.P.Cestaro 'The Dead Sea of Sodomy': Giordano da Pisa on Men Who Have Sex with Men; B.Schlager Bibbiena's Closet: Interpretation and the Sexual Culture of a Renaissance Papal Court; M.Wyatt 'Knots of Desire': Female Homoeroticism in Orlando furioso XXV ; M.M.DeCoste Acting Up in the Renaissance: The Case of Benvenuto Cellini; M.A.Gallucci 'Nature is a Mother Most Sweet': Homosexuality in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth- Century Italian Libertinism; G.Dall'Orto Tra(ns)vestying Gender and Genre in Flaminio Scala's Il (Finto) Marito; R.Kerr Beauty and the Beast: Lesbians in Literature and Sexual Science from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Centuries; D.Danna Desire and Disavowal in Liliana Cavani's 'German Triology'; A.O'Healy Adapting to Heterocentricity: The Film Versions of Umberto Saba's Ernesto and Giorgio Bassini's The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles; W.V.Watson Reluctantly Queer: In Search of the Homoerotic Novel in Twentieth-Century Italian Fiction; S.Parussa Secret Wounds: The Bodies of Facism in Giorgio Bassani's Dietro La Porta ; D.Duncan Transitive Gender and Queer Performance in the Novels of Mario Mieli and Vittorio Pescatori; M.Pustianaz Conclusion