Literatura Gay

This book chapter offers a comprehensive re-reading of Federico García Lorca, a canonic Spanish author, in the light of French historian of systems of ideas, Michel Foucault. Beginning with a critique of the Lorca cult (as tragic martyr) in the light of Foucault's essay 'The Author Function', it goes on to give close readings of Lorca plays 'The House of Bernarda Alba' and 'The Public', arguing that (like Foucault and unlike conventional criticism of Lorca) these texts are skeptical of sexual liberation and the revelation of true identity. Rather they point to the complex intersection of power, knowledge and pleasure.

Lajos Tárkony (1902-1978), esperanta poeto, eseisto kaj tradukisto, membro de la budapeŝta skolo, postlasis nur unu poemaron: Soifo (1964). En ĉi eseo mi analizas la vualitan, latentan samseksaman deziron, kiu estas spurebla en la menciita verko.

(The architecture of desire in the works of Lajos Tárkony). Lajos Tárkony (1902-1978), Esperanto poet, essayist and translator, member of the Budapest literature school, left just one poem book: Soifo (Thirst, 1964). In this essay I analyse the hiden, latent homosexual desire which can be found in the mentioned work.

Male against female, tradition against the new age, and East against West are the main notions questioned by David Hwang’s rather unique approach in M. Butterfly. M may either refer to Madame (as the term usually associated with the opera, mostly by those who have already read the play), or to the traditional abbreviation for Monsieur. Regardless of the interpretation, Hwang has managed to set the tone of the play just based on the title: traditional gender notions are challenged - basic categorization interpretation, the ideal of ‘other’ beauty, gender identity, sexual orientation, traditional notions of gender and one’s sense of self. Hwang based this play on Puccini’s play Madame Butterfly and wrote it during the time of sexual revolution in the U.S. where he had lived at the time; this is reflected in a series of gender transformations within the very play, leaving the reader and Rene confused whether Song is a man or a woman.

Aunque algunos cuentos de Manuel Mujica Lainez publicados de la década de los 50 introdujeron personajes de sexualidad disidente como parte de una mitología nacional sui generis, sin dudas es “La narración de la historia” (1959), de Carlos Correas, el texto que inauguró la figuración explícita del homoerotismo masculino en la narrativa argentina breve. A lo largo de las dos décadas siguientes, al tiempo que se reconfiguraban las subjetividades homoeróticas, aparecieron relatos y cuentos que -acercándose o distanciándose del ejemplo inicial de Correas- visibilizaron personajes, deseos, espacios y prácticas vinculados con la “homosexualidad”. El presente artículo pretende ofrecer un panorama de esta narrativa explorando sus posibles conexiones con otros discursos coetáneos (científicos, periodísticos, activistas), y en diálogo, además, con investigaciones recientes en torno a género y sexualidad.

While exclusively female societies are often sympathetically portrayed in modern utopian narrative and in science fiction, imaginary societies where male homosexuality is the norm have usually been portrayed as dystopias. Already in the Middle Ages, the attempted establishment of an exclusively homosexual male community by a fictional prince in the romance Berinus is violently rejected. Some modern narratives present an apocalyptic and dystopian future where masculinism, misogyny and normative sex/love between human males are conflated. Moreover, normative male gayness in speculative fiction often involves the totalitarian oppression of (heterosexual) ―natural‖ impulses. Confronted with such negative depictions of male homosexuality in its collective dimension, gay-minded writers have rarely provided interesting alternative utopian scenarios until recently. Furthermore, most of these have favored inclusion in an ideally open and inclusive society within our world, rather than to propose full-fledged utopias as free-standing societal constructions.

RESUMEN La narrativa costarricense actual pone en circulación una serie de temas nunca antes tratados en nues-tra literatura; tal es el caso del texto de Uriel Quesada, donde la problemática gay y el homoerotismo se plantean a partir de la voz del narrador-testigo-protagonista. ABSTRACT The current Costa Rican narrative includes topics that have never been written about before, such as Uriel Quesada's text, where gay issues and homoerotism are approached from the narrator-witness-protagonist's voice.

Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey
Male–male sexuality is the central trope of Boys’ Love (BL) manga with stories tending to revolve around a central uke-seme (‘bottom’–‘top’) pair. Although focused on men, BL is produced and consumed primarily by women. This article presents, from an anglophone British perspective, analysis of age-stratified male–male romance – paederasty – as portrayed in BL. My corpus consists of 234 commercially-translated original Japanese BL manga stories, created by 100 different mangaka (author-artists), published commercially in English between 2003 and 2012. A total of 68 (30%) of these stories were identified as involving agestratified relationships, eight of which were selected for detailed analysis. Seven were selected for typicality: Waru (2007) by Yukari Hashida deemed the most typical. Fangs (2008) by Hiroki Kusumoto was also included in analysis as the most atypical age-stratified story in order to test the robustness of identified patterns. I argue that that, from an anglophone perspective, the characteristic themes of age-stratified BL map surprising well onto the eroticised intra-familial dynamics of Freud and the intra- and inter-familial economics of Lévi-Strauss. The patterns identified are evidenced and discussed under the following headings: the mother identified son, the doubly divested man, the castrated father, men on the market and the mother with the phallus. These themes help build and substantiate my argument that age-stratified BL might work, within an anglophone context at least, as a feminist critique of patriarchy through the mechanism of phallic divestiture.

In 1889 a 23 year old Italian aristocrat sent French novelist Emile Zola an intriguing document, a tell-all anonymous autobiography in which he recounts his life as a young homosexual and which he suggests Zola might want to use as the base for a novel.

Zola does not directly use this document, although I have argued in a recent article that this document does influence his novel La Débâcle and the homosocial relationship of the two main characters, (this was not seen as such at the time). In 1894 Zola gives the manuscript to Doctor Georges Saint-Paul, who publishes it under the pseudonym of Laupts entitled Le Roman d'un Inverti-né first in Les Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle in1894 and 1895 and in his book entitled Tares et Poisons,Perversion et Perversité Sexuelles in 1896, with a preface by Émile Zola. As the manuscript was never found, we are unable to determine how much of the original text was kept and what changes were made, as it stands, the document remains a rare testimony of gay life in Italy at the end of the 19th century.
The story however does not end here, as the Italian author sends an additional document to Saint-Paul, when he discovers the book in a bookstore in September 1896.
This second essay is even more captivating than the first, as it is a reaction and a direct dialogue between this young homosexual and Doctor Saint-Paul. Up to very recently, only about 25% of this second testimony was known to us, published in 1910 by Dr. Georges Saint Paul in L'Homosexualité et les Types d'Homosexuels together with the original Roman d'un Inverti-né.
Recent discoveries will allow me to present the second part of this document in its entirety, revealing a mesmerizing socio-historical testimony of the life of a homosexual in Southern Italy during the final decade of the 19th century. Comparing this narrative to the social discourse of the period enables us to analyze the authenticity of contemporary sources on homosexuality and homosociale behavior.

Telltale hints might even allow us to be able to identify the author of this document thereby unraveling a 120 year old mystery.
My presentation will thus focus on the presentation of these discoveries and their historical and literary importance.

Resumen Brenda Berenice o el diario de una loca (1985) es una novela marginal dentro de la marginalidad de la que ya forma parte la literatura de temá-tica gay. En este artículo se hace un análisis de la novela del autor Luis Montaño (Cananea, Sonora, 1955-ciudad de México, 1985) desde una perspectiva sociológica y psicoanalítica. Los temas que se desarrollan son el papel del pueblo y la ciudad en la trama, un análisis de los sueños del personaje protagónico y las representaciones de ciertos aspectos de la cultura gay dentro de esta novela estructurada en forma de diario en el que su protagonista, un travesti sonorense radicado en la ciudad de Mé-xico, narra sus aventuras y desventuras del pasado y el presente. AbstRAct Brenda Berenice o el diario de una loca (1985) is a marginal novel inside the marginality of which it already is part the gay thematic literature. In this article there is an analysis of the novel written by Luis Montaño (Cananea, Sonora, 1955 – Mexico City, 1985) from a sociological and psychoanalytic perspective. The topics developed are the role of the village and the city in the plot, an analysis of the dreams of the leading person-age and the representations of certain aspects of gay culture inside this novel structured as a diary in which its protagonist, a sonoran drag that lives in Mexico City, narrates his adventures and misfortunes of the past and the present.

La siguiente ponencia se plantea explorar la relación entre amor y maldad a partir de la obra del artista argentino Santiago Loza: El mar de noche. A partir de ella, se estudiará la falta o ausencia del amor que siente el personaje de dicha obra, el amante, y que, a través de recuerdos y la falta física, anexiona el amor con el mal, tal es la hipótesis de este trabajo. En definitiva, respecto al tema que nos convoca en estas
jornadas: ¿puede ser malo el amor?, ¿puede haber maldad en el amor?, ¿qué es el mal del amor? El vínculo entre amor y mal fulgura a nivel discursivo, mal expresado a través de la palabra, en el discurso que se profiere. Es allí donde el mal del amor llega a su punto culmine, y donde ocurre la tragedia, la propia muerte como salvación. El abordaje que se propone es también desde la literatura, a través del análisis del discurso, puesto al servicio de comprender críticamente la apuesta que Loza cifra en el personaje del amante. El marco teórico en que se inscribe el trabajo será, fundamentalmente las figuras enumeradas en Fragmentos de un discurso amoroso de Roland Barthes, que darán cuenta del mal del amor.

CATULLUS' HOMOEROTIC POETRY: TEXTS AND SOME TRANSLATOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

This article shows a selection of Catullus' homoerotic texts and their translations. Thus, we analyze and introduce part of the Catullus' sexual source culture, which differs from the current homosexual target culture in order to make these texts and the knowledge therein contained available to the Latin American audience. Our aim is to produce these translations analyzing varied, complex and vague lexical sources, the differences between the source and target cultures, and other factors that challenge the translator in the realization of his work.

Resumen: este artículo presenta una selección de textos homoeróticos de Catulo y su traducción. De este modo, analizamos e introducimos parte de la cultura sexual fuente de Catulo, que difiere de la cultura meta homosexual actual con el fin de hacer llegar estos textos y el conocimiento expresado en ellos a un público latinoamericano. Nuestro objetivo es producir estas traducciones mediante el análisis de fuentes léxicas que son variadas, complejas y difusas; de las diferencias entre las culturas fuente y meta y; de otros factores que desafían al traductor en la realización de su trabajo.
Palabras clave: Catulo, poesía homoerótica antigua, traducción de Catulo, traductología.

Gaydar is the ability to identify homosexual through intuition or observations. This study investigated the different bases used by gay students of Polytechnic University of the Philippines in identifying individuals who have the same sexual orientation as theirs. The researchers conducted a social experiment wherein the gay respondents observed and listened to 4 straight men and a gay man. The respondents were instructed to use their gaydar and identify the gay among the observed individuals. The results showed that gays can accurately distinguish someone as gay based on how he talks and expresses himself with a certain intonation and pitch. In conclusion, verbal communication affects gaydar more than physical and facial features
Keywords: Gaydar, Gay, bases, verbal communication
 

Las dos novelas de este artículo (Melodrama [1985] de Luis
Zapata y Fruta verde [2006] de Enrique Serna) revelan la impregnación del melodrama cinematográfico mexicano en los comportamientos sociales de los personajes. La presencia paródica de los códigos melodramáticos da lugar a la deconstrucción de una ficción sexual impuesta desde el poder por diferentes redes vinculadas a él. Me interesa ver cómo funcionan esos códigos, cómo cuestionan las normas y hasta dónde llega la subversión.

The objective of this paper is to present the main features of hererosexual characters in an exemplary gay novel (Tomás Ortiz Te esperaré). In order to portray the gay vision of heterosexual masculinity the article analyzes the discoursive presence of heterosexuals and heterosexuality in Te esperaré by extracting vocabulary used by the narrator upon describing heterosexual males. Furthermore, it extracts the psychological and narrative features of heterosexuals, which seem most significant in terms of defining gay identity, since heteronormativity is the main point of reference for gay writers who create gay characters. In the following study we tried to demonstrate that the creation of heterosexual characters in mainstream gay novels is similar to the way gay characters are conceived in general mainstream ("heterosexual") novels.

El objetivo del presente trabajo es destacar los rasgos principales de los personajes heterosexuales en una novela gay ejemplar (Te esperaré de Tomás Ortiz). El artículo analiza la presencia discursiva de los heterosexuales y de la heterosexualidad como tal en Te esperaré para elaborar una imagen dominante de la maculinidad que observamos en la novela de Ortiz. Se trató principalmente de extraer el vocabulario del que se sirve el narrador a la hora de describir a hombres heterosexuales. La tarea de presentar los rasgos de los heterosexales parece tanto más válida ya que puede servir para definir la identidad gay, porque el punto del que parten los escritores gay a la hora de elaborar la personalidad e identidad de sus protagonistas gais es siempre el de la heteronormatividad. En nuestro estudio intentamos demostrar que la creación de los personajes heterosexuales en la novela gay de la corriente popular es similar a la creación de los personajes gais en la narrativa popular ("heterosexual") general.

Crystal Boys, as the first Chinese novel that depicts the life struggles in the homosexual community, grew out of the particular socio-historical environment of Taiwan in the 1970s, an environment of institutionalized patriarchy and homophobia. It is a story of survival and of the claiming of new forms of identity and relationality: its characters not only subvert oppressive discourses through appropriation and imagination, but also reaffirm their filial piety through remembrance and reconstruction, thus defying the essentializing force imposed by mainstream society. For these reasons, the novel has attracted abundant commentary, which is here discussed in light of the transformations of Taiwanese society.

Reinaldo Arenas, escritor cubano y homosexual declarado, se opone obstinadamente al régimen castrista; lucha para liberar la divergencia sexual, estética y de pensamiento de una Cuba que es incapaz de aceptar la "otredad"; un país que, tras el triunfo de la Revolución comunista, cambia una tiranía (la de Batista) por otra (la de Fidel Castro). Atrapado en una sociedad autoritaria y tradicionalmente machista, Arenas es perseguido tanto por su sexualidad y por unos textos en los que denuncia de forma irreverente las injusticias de un régimen político opresor. Este ensayo analiza la trayectoria personal de Arenas y parte de los acontecimientos biográficos que constituyen la fuerza motriz de su producción literaria, sin olvidarse de los conflictos históricos que son también parte integral de la formación del poeta y narrador cubano.

This paper focuses on the first queer film from Tollywood, featuring Rituparno Ghosh as a transvestite filmmaker, who had by that time emerged as a cultural icon in Bengal.

The paper deals with the politics of representation of the 'queer' vis-a-vis class and access to consumerist lifestyle. The paper pits the modern day transvestite filmmaker against the yesteryear female impersonator of Bengali folk theatre, Chapal Rani (who plays himself in the film), to delineate the trajectory of sexual identity politics in Bengal, and how it has been largely hegemonized by city-centric neo-liberal discourses of sexual identities, which have, unwittingly, established a power hierarchy within the LGBTQ community: the neo-liberal gay man and his local counterpart, who might not even identify with imported terms labeling sexually deviant individuals.

The last segment of the paper turns its attention to the social and political implications of casting Rituparno Ghosh as protagonist. While it was indeed iconoclastic on part of Ghosh to agree to essay the role, it is undeniable that this casting ended up generating a "queer" stereotype in the Bengali middle-class cultural domain. Because of the absence of any other queer icon, Rituparno Ghosh and parallel sexual identities have almost become synonymous within the consciousness of the less-informed middle class Bengalis. This has led to an extremely essentialized notions of queerness, which is hard to dispel.

Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey

The aim of this study is to compare Sinophone and Anglophone fan fiction consisting of female-oriented male-male romance: danmei and slash, respectively. To increase comparability, we analysed Harry Potter fan fiction in which the characters Harry and Draco are married. Male-male marriage was selected because our online Sinophone and Anglophone BL fandom surveys indicate this to be the most popular story element of the nine options we provided. We analysed five stories originally written in Chinese and five originally written in English which subsequently had been fan-translated into Chinese. Using Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) we found some robust patterns. In contrast to the Anglophone fiction, the Sinophone tended to: stress the importance of family approval for the marriage; incorporate a wedding ceremony; employ clearly gendered roles between partners; utilise extended, as opposed to nuclear, families; and showed the couple to produce children, particularly boys. Hence, the stories mirror the relative social conservatism and social liberalism of their cultures of origin. However, in reading and writing such danmei young Chinese women are still pushing at the boundaries of the traditional family.

This petition argues that erotic comics are an important cultural record of the way in which diverse sexualities are understood and portrayed, and sexual fantasies explored. An Erotic Comics Anglophone Archive (ErotiCAA) will preserve these works for research by scholars in many different disciplines.

One of the biggest problems facing anyone researching pornography/erotica or comics, and therefore doubly so for anyone researching erotic/pornographic comics, is finding and gaining access to primary materials. So we have decided to have a go at establishing an archive in the UK to collect and catalogue English-language porn and erotic comics.

We intend to approach a number of libraries and research institutions to host and/or fund the archive. Persuading them to support us will be a lot easier if we an show that there is a need for this archive, so to help with that we’ve started this petition.

We’ve already got this kick-ass logo designed for us by Alison Lucy Stone and meetings set up with a couple of big libraries. Help us out by signing the petition? And if you’d like to be more involved, please tweet Dr Anna Madill @UKFujoshi or Dr Jude Roberts @tangendentalism - we’d love to hear from you!

Il caso della traduzione italiana del romanzo 'Boquitas Pintadas' di Manuel Puig è esemplare. L'opera, uscita a Buenos Aires presso l'Editorial  Sudamericana, nel 1969, esce in italiano nel '71, tradotta da Enrico Cicogna per Feltrinelli, con il titolo 'Una frase un rigo appena'. Il titolo non è che la punta dell'iceberg. Nel testo le citazioni dei tangos di Gardel, fondamentali nella narrazione, sono sostitute con citazioni di canzonette italiane. Dove l'autore cita Sarmiento, uno dei padri della Patria Argentina, il traduttore traduce: Garibaldi. Si mostra qui come le traduzioni dei romanzi ispanoamericani erano condotte all'insegna del pregiudizio e di vizi ideologici. Un'America Latina di fantasia è sostituita all'Argentina narrata dall'autore. Non solo manca il rispetto filologico del testo, ma si nega al lettore la percezione del clima storico e culturale dal quale l'opera emerge. Al di là del caso esemplare di cattiva traduzione, resta aperta la riflessione sulla difficile arte della traduzione letteraria.

This is the expanded version of this paper:

"(Anti)Gay Utopian Fiction in English and Romance Languages: An Overview", Revista Morus: Utopia e Renascimento, 11, 1 (2016), pp. 199-229

(Further works are discussed, of which I was not aware when the paper was published)

Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey

Researching Sex and Sexualities
University of Sussex 8-9th May 2015
Anna Madill for METHODOLOGIES STRAND

Abstract: Rotten girl on rotten girl: Boys’ Love ‘research’

‘Fujoshi’ (rotten girl) is a derogatory Japanese term for female fans of homoerotic manga and anime in the genre know as Boys’ Love (BL). BL is a global phenomenon and, overlapping with the male-male slash community, one of the largest, female-oriented erotic subcultures. I have underway, what is already, the biggest survey of the Anglophone fandom (https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey) and have, so far, completed around 12 face-to-face and 30 e-mail interviews. This is the first project I have conducted on sexually explicit material and, although I consider myself to be a fujoshi, I am not, otherwise, a user of pornography/sexually explicit material. In fact, this research has presented a huge challenge to me in terms of becoming more comfortable discussing sexual topics and, even more personally, in making my own investment in MxM public. This has meant dealing with feelings of embarrassment and shame, but also of relief in finding and communicating with other women who have a similar erotic fantasy life. However, the project has also made me feel, at times, frankly paranoid because I have been afraid that my BL may contravene UK prohibited images of children legislation (it doesn’t!). What does BL represent for me that I am willing to put myself through this, spend most of my spare time on it, and, hence, is it really ‘research’?

Biography
Anna Madill is Chair in Qualitative Inquiry and Deputy Head of the School of Psychology, University of Leeds, and member of the university Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies. She is Co-Founder and former Chair (2008-11) of the British Psychological Society Qualitative Methods in Psychology Section and is Associated Editor of the British Journal of Clinical Psychology. Anna received British Academy funding (2011-2013) for ‘Understanding Japanese Boys' Love manga from a UK perspective’ from which she has three book chapters in press, made 12 conference presentations (including a keynote) and many other presentations to academics and the public, and, in relation to which, she has been consulted by the BBC.

The article retraces the locations of E. M. Forster's novels (Italy, England, India) and seeks to establish their role in the context of conventional geography of homosexual desire at the turn of the 19th and the 20th century. Published in the collection "New Aspects of E. M. Forster."

Pochi autori contemporanei hanno diviso la critica e il pubblico quanto Pier Vittorio Tondelli (Correggio, 1955 – Reggio Emilia, 1991). Scrittore “blasfemo” per il Procuratore generale de L’Aquila, Donato Massimo Bartolomei, tanto da portare in Tribunale Altri libertini con la seguente accusa: "Per il suo contenuto luridamente blasfemo ed osceno nella triviale presentazione di un esteso repertorio di bestemmie contro le divinità del Cristianesimo, nonché di irriferibili turpiloqui, [...] onde il lettore viene violentemente stimolato verso la depravazione sessuale ed il disprezzo della religione cattolica." (1992, 14). 

Autore ricco di spiritualità, grazia divina e vocazione religiosa secondo il critico gesuita Antonio Spadaro (1995; 1999; 2002) e lo scrittore Gilberto Severini (1992), tanto da essere ammesso nel canone cattolico: “[Tondelli è] uno scrittore il cui percorso si configura radicalmente come un'attesa di salvezza teologicamente connotata” (2002, 267). Autore non solo per nulla volgare, ma al contrario dotato di un “animo romantico e delicato” per il critico laico Mario Fortunato (1999, 175).

Il Tribunale de L’Aquila assolse Altri libertini dall’accusa di vilipendio con formula piena, ma se si arrivò al rinvio a giudizio per un reato di questo genere nell’Italia di fine ventesimo secolo, qualche elemento di discussione giudiziaria avrà dovuto sussistere. Del resto, la stessa volontà dell’autore di rivedere alcune espressioni blasfeme dei primi due capitoli del libro pochi mesi prima di morire, volontà trasmessa al suo esecutore testamentario, segna un qualche tipo di disagio morale provato dallo scrittore a distanza di anni dalla sua prima pubblicazione.

Di là dal caso del testo d’esordio, anche il romanzo della maturità, Camere separate, è stato interpretato in modi assai distanti: un romanzo “a dimensione religiosa” (Spadaro, 2002, 223-60), possibile da leggere “senza pensare alla specificità dell’amore omosessuale” (Piersanti, 1992, 98) e al contempo come “a novel of ‘deep and sacred mourning’ that reviews the love affair of the young Leo and Thomas and traces the quest of the intensely self-examining and chronically ‘separate’ Leo to ‘become available’ to experience again after Thomas’s death from AIDS” (Cady, 1995, 17), parte di quella “visione gay della vita e della letteratura che Tondelli rappresenta in modo esplicito e appassionato” (Gnerre, 2005, 425).

Questa ambiguità, o bivalenza, che avvolge la produzione dell’autore di Correggio, si estende anche sull’uomo Tondelli: uomo religioso, cattolico, dalle cui righe sgorga una continua ricerca dell’Eterno e la cui biblioteca contiene “innanzitutto la Bibbia, in diverse edizioni” e “un centinaio di volumi religiosi” (Spadaro, 2002, 269), oppure il “busone da sbarco” (Dall’Orto, 1982), il cantore del libertinaggio, della goliardia gay, del vino, del sesso trasgressivo, del sentimento e dell’amore omosessuale, la cui videoteca conteneva “migliaia di film porno gay” (Rota, 2007) e diverse centinaia di libri a tematica gay? E ancora: Tondelli come “scrittore del disimpegno” (Bettin, 1980; Medici, 1982; Dall’Orto, 1992; Guglielmi, 1995; Buia, 1999 e altri), oppure “militante gay del movimento di liberazione” (Dall’Orto, 1982), “autore gay” (Gnerre, 1986; 2007), il cui “universo letterario includeva una visione gay della vita e della letteratura” (Colombo, 1992, 242), o ancora scrittore socio-politicamente impegnato e vero esponente letterario del Settantasette (Palandri, 2005; Vianello, 2005), il cui libro d’esordio, Altri libertini è, a mio avviso (2010), più politico di Enrico Palandri e del suo romantico Boccalone?

Il mio contributo per L'italia letteraria e cinematografica dal secondo Novecento ai giorni nostri si propone di continuare a scavare sui testi tondelliani per dimostrare il carattere politico dell’impegno dello scrittore emiliano, al contrario di quanto sostenuto dalla gran maggioranza della critica, in particolare italiana.

Per far ciò, il mio studio intende muoversi su due fronti. Da un lato, la mia analisi applicherà all’opera di Tondelli la lezione di Deleuze e Guattari  relativa alla identificazione di una cosiddetta “letteratura minore” nella quale “everything is political” (1986, 17). Dall’altro, il mio contributo porrà a verifica critica le motivazioni che spinsero una importante autorità politica come Massimo D’Alema a descrivere Altri libertini come “un romanzo politico” (1980).

Abstract. In The Stranger’s Child, Alan Hollinghurst retraces the changes that marked English culture and attitudes over the 20th century, especially regarding homosexuals. The author also describes the mechanisms governing the process of creating and re-writing versions of English history. Hollinghurst reveals the multiplicity of contradictory voices with which the historian/biographer has to deal, as well as the apparent historicity of the researcher whose “present” interferes with the investigated “past.” Although the novel gives evidence of the progressing democratization and polyphony of historical writing, it focuses on the factors responsible for misrepresenting history: the fallibility of human memory, the unintentional or deliberate annihilation of heritage, the personal agenda of both witnesses who conceal or falsify certain facts, and researchers whose primary goal is to prove their point.

Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey

Genre, genealogy, and gender: Reflecting on Boys' Love manga This presentation will focus on a genre of manga known as Boys' Love, BL or 'yaoi'. The central trope of BL is the portrayal of sexual and romantic relationships between, usually young, men. Originating from shojo (girls) manga in early 1970s Japan, BL is now a worldwide phenomenon. This presentation will trace briefly the complex genealogical development of BL (sub)genres. Current findings from the largest – and ongoing survey of the Anglophone BL fandom will be presented (https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey) to provide insights into the fandom demographic with regard to gender and sexual orientation. The meaning of BL as a genre will be interrogated using data from the presenter's coding of 240 original Japanese BLmanga available in commercial English translation and survey data on the erotic material preference of the Anglophone fandom. This will include consideration of questions such as the extent to which BL is a 'parasitic' genre and whether it might be considered to have its own distinct chronotope. Finally, the importance of male-male erotic fantasy for women prior to the development of BL and outside its fandom is explored. In conclusion, the evidence and arguments presented will be drawn together to suggest that BL is possibly one of the most visible modes of working through the 'hysteric's' fundamental questions of being: 'am I a man or a women?' and 'what is a woman?'