Queer Italy: an example of literature search

Inclusive searches & sources @UvA Romance languages (25)

Whether it’s a book, a journal article, a thesis, or a Wikipedia page, the references listed by each of these sources represent a useful starting point to further explore the literature on a given topic. The aim of the current post is to give some examples of how to search for scholarly literature on queer Italy.

EXPLORE THE EXISTING LITERATURE
Here below follows some sources related to the topic. How can you use them, or those found in any other publication that you deem relevant to the topic of your assignment?

1) Identify the publications you are interested in;

2) Browse their bibliographical references (backward citation tracking);

3) Check their ‘Cited by’ scores at Google Scholar (i.e. publications which might have cited the ‘original’ source: forward citation tracking);

4) Repeat the previous steps with every new relevant publication you collect, to map further the existing literature and set up a first draft of your own bibliography.

• Cestaro, Gary P., editor. Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
• Galt, Rosalind, and Karl Schoonover. “Untimely Desires, Historical Efflorescence, and Italy in Call Me by Your Name”. Italian Culture, vol.37, no. 1, 2019, pp. 64-81.
• Marchetti, Giulia, et al. “Italian Youth Mobility: The Case for a Mediterranean Model of ‘Family-Centred’ Mobile Transitions”. Ethnicities, vol.22, no. 1, 2022, pp .108-127.
• Ross, Charlotte, et al. “Queer Italian Studies: Critical Reflections from the Field”. Italian Studies, 2019, vol.74, no. 4, pp. 397-412.

DEVISE SEARCH TERMS AND STRINGS
Apart from the above, any given publication will also help you devise keywords convenient to search literature. How can you do that?

1) let’s say that you have chosen to research writer Matteo B. Bianchi‘s fiction, specifically his debut novel Generations of love. Next to searching at the specific level of the book title and writer’s biography and work, you will also need to gather literature on the broader topic of queer Italian fiction, for the theoretical frame necessary to contextualize your own take on Bianchi’s oeuvre;

2) the Uva CataloguePlus entries to Cestaro 2004 and Ross 2019 (see full references above) provide a first set of words, highlighted in the screenshots below, which you can use as search terms: yellow are the synonyms of (or terms related to) ‘queer’, ‘Italian’, ‘fiction’; light blue are writers or books whose queer identity/work has already been researched and is therefore worth a separate search for more relevant literature;

3) based on the above, a first draft of search string could be: (feminis* OR “gender studies” OR homoerotic* OR homosexual* OR lesbian* OR lgbt* OR queer* OR “same sex”) AND “italian literature”. In CataloguePlus (searching by ‘Subject’ or ‘Title’, see screenshot), this retrieves (at the time of writing) 392 titles;

4) apart from adjusting the previous string – for example by adding words such as ‘books’, ‘fiction’, ‘novels’, ‘short stories’ to the ‘italian literature’ component – something you’ll definitely want to do is to search also using Italian words (for the rationale of this, see the Library333 post Finding scholarly literature in languages other than English): (femminis* OR gender OR omoeroti* OR omosessual* OR lesbic* OR lgbt* OR queer*) AND “letteratura italiana”;

5) conveniently adjusted – as mentioned above and as might be requested by a different search tool (such as Google Scholar, see Google Scholar: bias, settings, advanced search, alerts) – both the English and Italian search string can be used also with other (bibliographic) resources relevant for Italian Studies (see list here).

Library guide Italian studies. “Italy: emigration and immigration”

Inclusive searches & sources @UvA Romance Languages (24)

Fifth in the series – having been preceded by those on National identity, Mafia and other organized-crime groups, Franco Basaglia‘s democratic psychiatry, and Prostitution in Italy: The Merlin Law -, the guide on emigration and immigration to/from Italy is also partly based on previous blogs of this series, namely Migrant women writers from & in Italy and 10 Migrant women writers in Italy.

You can browse the guide below, or otherwise feel welcome to ask me a PDF version.

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Library guide Italian Studies. “Prostitution in Italy. The Merlin Law”

Inclusive searches & sources @UvA Romance Languages (23)

Following national identity, mafia and other organized-crime groups, and Franco Basaglia‘s democratic psychiatry, Prostitution in Italy, with a specific focus on the 1958 Merlin Law, is the fourth topic forthcoming from the collaboration with Elio Baldi and Linda Pennings at the Department of Italian Studies, aimed at broadening the UvA Library holdings (with acquisitions on topics related to diversity, equity and inclusion) and at increasing students’ access and use of the UvA Library (books) collections.

Named after its first proponent, Socialist senator Lina Merlin (1887-1979), the Italian Law 75/1958 – as summarized on the website of IROKO (an Italian NGO “supporting victims of trafficking and sexual exploitation”) – «abolished brothels – 560 of them when it was approved -, the embodiment of State regulation of prostitution. It abolished the keeping of records of prostituted women, freeing them from the heavy stigma and providing an opportunity for them to escape from prostitution. Essentially, this law aimed to avoid any woman being forced, coerced or encouraged to get into or to remain in prostitution. The Merlin Law can be seen as a pioneer for recent abolitionist laws, approved in various countries around the world and it serves as our point of reference to reflect both culturally and politically on prostitution itself. Nonetheless, or perhaps precisely for this reason, the law periodically comes under fire».

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Library guide Italian Studies. “Democratic psychiatry & Franco Basaglia”

Inclusive searches & sources @UvA Romance Languages (22)

After national identity and mafia and other organized-crime groups, Franco Basaglia‘s democratic psychiatry (or anti-psychiatry) is the third topic forthcoming from the collaboration with Elio Baldi and Linda Pennings at the Department of Italian Studies, aimed at broadening the UvA Library holdings (with acquisitions on topics related to diversity, equity and inclusion) and at increasing students’ access and use of the UvA Library (books) collections.

As summarized by leading scholar of Italian Studies, John Foot, in his entry on Basaglia for the The Oxford handbook of phenomenological psychopathology: «A radical psychiatrist, Franco Basaglia was born in Venice in 1924. He came into contact with phenomenological texts while studying psychiatry at the University of Padua in the 1940s and 1950s. When he became Director of the Psychiatric Hospital in the north-eastern city of Gorizia in 1961 he began to apply these ideas to the reform of the hospital. Wards were opened, walls knocked down (by the patients), and meetings held. Gorizia became a beacon for change in 1968 with the publication of Basaglia’s edited volume L’istituzione negata (The Negated Institution) (Einaudi 1968). A movement developed which culminated in the 1978 “Basaglia Law,” which closed down the entire Italian asylum system».

You can browse the guide below, or otherwise feel welcome to ask me a PDF version.

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Library guide Italian Studies. “Mafia and other organized-crime groups”

Inclusive searches & sources @UvA Romance Languages (21)

The topic of the first Library guide Italian Studies was national identity, which easily related to diversity, equity and inclusion through the ways a given people defines its collective identity, and what kinds of diversity that identity includes, on equitable ground.

The present Library guide – on the mafia and other organized-crime groups – might seem less related to diversity, equity and inclusion, were it not for the ways that Italian collective history and identity and, therefore, (stereotyped) image and reputation, are often (prejudicially) defined by the role of organized crime in the Country’s past and present.

In the curricular context of a bachelor’s in Italian Studies it is therefore relevant to help students find scholarly sources about how fiction and media explore and represent the Italian mafia, and how such representations might contribute to (de)construct stereotypes and prejudices.

The Library guide is therefore organized around four different themes, i.e. mafia and literature; mafia and cinema/television; Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino (two anti-mafia judges murdered by the mafia in 1992); and Questione meridionale and Mezzogiorno. Among the readings are titles such as Donne, mafia e cinema: Una prospettiva interdisciplinare (Women, mafia and cinema: An Interdisciplinary perspective), or La questione: Come liberare la storia del Mezzogiorno dagli stereotipi (The problem: How to free Southern Italy’s history from the stereotypes).

You can browse the guide below, or otherwise feel welcome to ask me a PDF version.

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New: Library guide for Italian Studies. “National identity”

Inclusive searches & sources @UvA Romance languages (20)

This blog series, as laid out a year ago when starting, aims among others at being «a collaborative effort to help broaden and diversify both the UvA Library collections and the way staff and students, assisted by Information specialists, search, find and evaluate (scholarly) information».

Thanks to the collaboration with Elio Baldi and Linda Pennings at the Department of Italian Studies, aimed both at broadening the UvA Library holdings (with acquisitions on topics related to diversity, equity and inclusion) and at increasing students’ access and use of the UvA Library (books) collections, I’ve designed a ‘Library guide’ consisting of some reading lists on a given curricular topic, the first one being national identity.

Each list is introduced by the UvA CataloguePlus search on which it is based. While all listed publications are (at least in part) relevant to the topic, the readings are not meant to be exhaustive, as they are inherently limited by their drawing only from UvA Library holdings. Additional search examples from other online resources are given at the end of each guide. You can browse the guide below, or otherwise feel welcome to ask me a PDF version.

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Congres “Les Lieux de Georges Perec”

Postuum uitgegeven in 2022 door uitgever Seuil – samen met een interactieve website waarop de volledige tekst op verschillende manieren te onderzoeken is – Lieux van Georges Perec (1936-1982) «is een onvoltooid gebleven, autobiografisch en etnografisch project waaraan Perec werkte van 1969 tot 1975. Het bestaat uit jaarlijkse beschrijvingen van twaalf plekken in Parijs die voor hem persoonlijke ‘lieux de mémoire’ waren. Het zijn momentopnames van een bepaalde plek maar ook herinneringen die met die plek verbonden zijn. Het project mondde uit in een rijk en fascinerend geheel van teksten, foto’s en persoonlijke documenten» [Platform Frans].

Naar aanleiding van de (digitale) uitgave vindt van 25 t/m 27 januari aan de Universiteit Leiden een congres plaats, georganiseerd door Annelies Schulte Nordholt (Universiteit Leiden), auteur van Georges Perec et ses lieux de mémoire (Brill, 2022), Wim Lai (Universiteit Leiden) en Manet van Montfrans (Universiteit van Amsterdam), auteur van Georges Perec: Een gebruiksaanwijzing (Arbeiderspers, 2019).

Meer informatie en aanmelden: hier.

“La resistenza delle donne”, Premio Campiello 2023

Inclusive searches & sources @UvA Romance Languages (19)

Already the author of books on her father’s murder by far-left terrorists, in 1980 (Come mi batte forte il tuo cuore: Storia di mio padre, 2009) and on two massacres by neofascist terrorists in Brescia, 1974 (Una stella incoronata di buio: Storia di una strage impunita, 2013) and in Milano, 1969 (Piazza Fontana: Il processo impossibile, 2019), Benedetta Tobagi (Milano, 1977) moved from the “Anni di piombo” to the Italian Resistance to write La resistenza delle donne, who earned her the latest edition of the prestigious Premio Campiello (won in the past, among others, by Michela Murgia).

Benedetta Tobagi: source

Significantly, also the book winning the second prize at the Campiello 2023, Silvia Ballestra’s La Sibilla: Vita di Joyce Lussu, relates to women’s role during the Italian Resistance, as it explores the life of partisan, translator and writer Joyce Lussu (born Gioconda Beatrice Salvadori Paleotti, 1912-1998).

Tobagi and Ballestra’s success comes with the growing (scholarly) attention to the role played by women (also) during the Italian Resistance against nazi-fascism. This, combined with my personal interest in the topics – i.e. women in history, and the Italian Resistance – lead me to explore the UvA Library relevant holdings, starting with a visit to the P.C. Hoofthuis shelves where, among others, Tobagi’s book stands next to that milestone of Italian wartime diaries represented by Ada Gobetti‘s Diario partigiano, first published in 1956 (see the 2017 post Resistance as friendship: Ada Gobetti’s Diario partigiano).

The Library of Congress Classification Code (D802.I8*) assigned to all the books on the shelves corresponds to the Library of Congress Subject Heading World War, 1939-1945–Underground movements–Italy, and as such helps to group several relevant printed titles on the same spot in the physical library.

Yet: realizing that another book I’ve recently read – and warmly recommend – Giovanna Zangrandi’s I giorni veri: Diario della resistenza, was not on the D802.I8* shelves, and being familiar with some LCC/LCSH’s idiosyncrasies, I decided for a wider exploration of the topic via de UvA CataloguePlus, which could also help discover relevant online sources.

If I run an ‘Advanced search’ in CataloguePlus by ‘subject’ or ‘title’ with (donn* OR women OR woman) (partigian* OR resistenza OR resistan* OR partisan) (italy OR italia*), twenty-two books are retrieved, ten of which are e-publications or have received another classification code than D802.I8*, i.e. they are elsewhere at the P.C. Hoofthuis Library. Nineteen titles (see list below) actually deal with the topic of women of the Italian Resistance.

By adjusting the different components of the search query – dropping (italy OR italia*)? Searching ‘Any field’? Including also journal articles? – it will be possible to vary the results. It will also be worth the effort to run searches for the names of (well-)known women partisans, such as the already mentioned Ada Gobetti (1902-1968), Giovanna Zangrandi (1910-1988), and Joyce Lussu, or Bianca Guidetti Serra (1919-2014), Elsa Oliva (1921-1994), Frida Malan (1917-2002), Silvia Pons (1919-1958), among others.

• Jomarie Alano, A life of resistance : Ada Prospero Marchesini Gobetti (1902-1968), University of Rochester Press, 2016.
• Valeria Paola Babini, Parole armate: Le grandi scrittrici del Novecento italiano tra Resistenza ed emancipazione, La tartaruga, 2018.
• Bruna Bertolo – Ornella Testori, L’ufficiale in bicicletta: Storia partigiana di Lucia Boetto Testori, Neos edizioni, 2023.
• Vera Bessone – Massimo Roccaforte (editors), Partigiane della libertà, NFC Edizioni, 2015.
• Ilenia Carrone, Le donne della Resistenza: La trasmissione della memoria nel racconto dei figli e delle figlie delle partigiane, Infinito edizioni, 2014.
• Giovanni De Luna, La Resistenza perfetta, Feltrinelli, 2015.
• Davide Di Poce – Giulia Vassallo – Elisiana Fratocchi, Il pane e le rose : scritture femminili della Resistenza, Bulzoni editore, 2018.
• Greta Fedele – Sara Troglio, Vera: Resistenza, deportazione e impegno di Vera Michelin-Salomon, Mimesis, 2021.
• Ada Gobetti, Diario partigiano, Einaudi, 2014.
• Ada Gobetti, Partisan diary: A woman’s life in the Italian resistance, Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Iole Mancini – Concetto Vecchio, Un amore partigiano, Feltrinelli, 2022.
• Luisa Manfredi King, Ero proprio “uno” di loro: Una comandante partigiana in Bassa Valtellina, Edizioni SEB 27, 2017.
• Caroline Moorehead, A house in the mountains: The women who liberated Italy from fascism, Vintage, 2020.
• Rossella Pace, I liberali non hanno canzoni: Maria Giulia Cardini, storia di una partigiana, Rubbettino, 2022.
• Rossella Pace – Virginia Minoletti Quarello, Partigiane liberali: Organizzazione, cultura, guerra e azione civile, Rubbettino, 2020.
• Michela Ponzani, Guerra alle donne: Partigiane, vittime di stupro, “amanti del nemico” 1940-45, Einaudi, 2021.
• Elena Porciani, Le donne nella narrativa della Resistenza: Rappresentazioni del femminile e stereotipi di genere, Villaggio Maori edizioni, 2016.
• Ilenia Rossini (editor), Un fiore che non muore: La voce delle donne nella Resistenza italiana, Red Star Press, 2014.
• Benedetta Tobagi, La Resistenza delle donne, Einaudi, 2022.

New books from the Bibliothèques francophones (Classiques Garnier)

First purchased in 2021, and expanded last year with the volume Ducharme et Rimbaud: L’océan de la beauté, the Classiques Garnier’s collection Bibliothèques francophones has now been further augmented by the following two volumes:

• Fritz Peter Kirsch, Sur les francophonies et leurs littératures: Approches interculturelles
  «Based on an analysis of literary texts, this essay explores the historical phenomena that, from the Middle Ages to the present day, have led to the predominance of France, its language, and its culture. The relationship between French and Occitan culture is closely examined».
  
  
• Dima Samaha, Le Pays envolé: Romans libanais de l’émigration (1998-2012)
  «The first comparative study of novels published between 1998 and 2012, in English and in French, by Lebanese writers who emigrated after the start of the civil war, this essay explores the narrative strategies and historiographical processes involved in a permanent questioning of filiation».

“Les Colleuses”: French women street artists against gender-based violence. With literature search tips

Inclusive searches & sources @UvA Romance languages (18)

The UNITE campaign runs for sixteen days from November 25th, International day for the elimination of violence against women, to December 10th, International Human Rights Day.

source

Active since 2016 and making the headlines with their protest at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, «Les Colleuses – the gluers – [are] feminist activists who have found a simple, cheap and effective way to make women’s voices heard» [source], i.e. pasting collages of black-lettered texts on walls, to denounce femicide and gender-related violence. While originating in France, similar (groups of) artists activists are now working also elsewhere, such as The Hate Lovers in Barcelona or LeDiesis in Firenze.

While the literature on graffiti and street art is vast, (scholarly) interest in the role played by women in the development of collage (i.e. the 2019 exhibition Cut and Paste at the National Galleries of Scotland) and of (overtly activist forms of) graffiti and street art (i.e. Diego López Giménez’s 2022 book Yo grafitera: Grafiti, street art y muralismo de mujeres) is – alas, unsurprisingly – more recent. Let’s take a look at how to explore it.

• Before starting
  Even without considering this blog series’ focus on the Romance languages, it’s the international character of both phenomena – gender-related violence and creative answers against it – that advises to set up search strings in several languages and for different resources. While using French and English in the following examples, it is important to remember that the search strings below can also be translated into other languages and used in the same (and other) resources (check UvA-Library lists for Italian and Spanish).
  
  
• “Quick & dirty search”: UvA CataloguePlus and Google Scholar
  Searching the UvA CataloguePlus with “colleuses” retrieves only one relevant article, Stages, streets, and social media: Intersectional feminism and online activism in France during the pandemic, published in 2022 in “French Politics, Culture and Society” by Hamilton College Associate Professor of French Claire Moufard. Yet: check our previous post (Scholarly literature on) Spanish crime fiction about & by women (2): Books at the UvA Library (and their authors) on how to use even a single article, such as Moufard’s, to find other relevant publications (via citation tracking, the author’s personal website, etc.). Searching Google Scholar with “colleuses” and limiting the results to those after 2016, retrieves some additional titles. Just as with CataloguePlus’ results: mind the different meanings of ‘colleuse’ in French.

• Other (broader) search terms, and different (language specific) resources
  If deciding for a broader scope of our literature search, CataloguePlus can be explored with the following combination of search terms (or part of it), to find (scholarly) literature on:
  
  feminist French street art (or French street art by women): (feminis* OR femme* OR woman OR women) AND (france OR francais* OR french) AND (“street art*” OR graffiti* OR collag*)
  
  French street art: (france OR francais* OR french) AND (“street art*” OR graffiti* OR collag*)
  
  feminist street art (or street art by women): (feminis* OR femme* OR woman OR women) AND (“street art*” OR graffiti* OR collag*)
  
  At Google Scholar – first check its search options at the Library333 post Google Scholar: bias, settings, advanced search, alerts – you can use strings such as (“street art” OR graffiti OR collage OR collagisme) “féminisme” (mind féminisme’s grave accent and quotation marks) or (“street art” OR graffiti OR collage) women: compare the results when changing language, both of the search terms and of Scholar‘s interface (see screenshot below for an example).
  
  Language specific resources (the use of French terms is recommended) for finding more literature include among others Cairn, OpenEdition journals and Persée: Portail de revues scientifiques en sciences humaines et sociales, all of them accessible via the UvA Library. Check their ‘Help’ section for specific search options.