Tra la fine del XIX l’inizio del XX secolo, quando il Positivismo raggiunge il suo apogeo, pratiche scientifiche e fenomeni legati al mondo paranormale si contaminano vicendevolmente, influenzando il panorama culturale e artistico della Belle Époque. Nel contesto europeo gli studi scientifici intorno alle sedute spiritiche e alle ‘materializzazioni’ di fantasmi occupano un posto di rilievo, che mette in luce il primato di medium femminili all’interno di tali pratiche sovversive. Tra queste si ritrovano Linda Gazzera ed Eva Carrière, due giovani donne il cui fascino destò l’interesse di importanti personalità del mondo medico quali Cesare Lombroso e Charles Richet. Durante le loro sedute, difatti, oltre a dirigere giochi di suggestione e illusionismo testimoniati dal medium fotografico, (rinvenute presso il Museo Lombroso, la Bibliothèque de l’Académie de Médecine, e l’Institut Métapsychique International) le due donne attraverso il travestimento medianico e un originale pratica di gender performing che prevede l’uso ricorrente di pseudonimi maschili guadagnano una voce propria, conquistando uno spazio di libertà ed emancipazione sociale altrimenti impossibili da ottenere.
Artists are often stereotyped as eccentric individuals with unique personalities and attitudes. Therefore, while in traditionalist Greek society the LGBT community has long experienced oppression or marginalization, homosexual male artists were comparatively more allowed to deviate from social norms. This led Greek homosexual artists to hide their sexual orientation in their social life while expressing it covertly or, in a few cases, explicitly, in their art. This paper studies the expression of sexual identity in the artworks of the Greek painter, Diamantis Diamantopoulos (1914-1995). In many of his pictures – mostly anthropocentric in subjects, focusing on the male human body – he hinted at his homosexuality more or less covertly. I aim to examine these works in correlation with issues of subjectivity and otherness, in the context of the artist’s lived experiences and social status. My research is based on Erving Goffman’s theory about social roles, and Didier Eribon’s books on sexual and class identity.
The contributions collected in this special issue of Whatever shed light on modes and forms of visual representation within twentieth-century Mediterranean artistic practices for the construction of expanded subjectivities in constant metamorphosis. The essays participate in the construction of an alternative historiography of Italian and Southern European art that acts as a narrative “against the grain” to foster a new area of art historical studies inflected by queer perspectives, complementary to the Anglo-American and North European theoretical and historiographical canons. The studies published here focus on theories and experiences capable of expressing resilient and inventive forms of subjective identities that are hybrid or dissident from social norms. Authors in this special issue have addressed topics of the body, desire, and eroticism in areas traditionally considered particularly heteronormative and whose narrative strategies of subjectivity outside the norm have been less explored.
This paper aims at a queer theoretical reading of what the painter Filippo de Pisis called “irresistible complications”, that is subtle deconstruction of heteronormative narratives, in Magic Realism paintings of the 1920s in Italy. Exemplified by rare emergences of the sociological reception of painted subjects concerning desire, the discussion takes into account two male painters, Felice Casorati and Ubaldo Oppi. Their works dedicated to disquieting female, same-sex affection (the typical subject of Le amiche) are analyzed through the lens of queer theory. René Girard’s triangular desire allows to articulate the thematic presence of the male gaze in this representation of sapphism.
The pioneering depiction of male nudes by the Cypriot painter Andreas Karayan (b. 1943) caused quite a stir in the Cypriot art scene, when exhibited from the late 1970s onwards. Using Constantine Cavafy’s poetry as a starting point and recurring reference, Karayan portrays the male nudes as both sexual(ized) subjectivities, as well as, and because of their eroticism, embodiments of social protest and queer subversion. Even more subversive, however, are some other works, from the late 1970s and through the 1980s: images of (fully dressed) young men in public spaces – bus stops, streets, coffee shops – and of sailors and soldiers in seemingly banal conditions (for instance, resting before or after an official parade). Such works, for the first time in Cypriot art, not only brought, literally, into the open, (homo)erotic desire (gazes are exchanged, seeking response, or are directed toward the viewer), but they are also imbued with political irony and critique that interrogate issues, and queerly subvert discourses, of power, desire, and national and other ‘sacred’ symbols of collective identity.
