Queering the Natural Family: LGBTQ+ Kinship in Italy

[00:00:00][Music] foreign [Music] by Professor Charlotte Ross the Gojo professor in Italian Studies for uh for the uh winter term 2023. it's a professor Ross has made a great contribution to our community was really a pleasure to have her with us and we look forward to her last as the third and as I said sadly last uh lecture um I will briefly introduce Professor Ross although I think probably most of you who are connected uh know her and have had the pleasure of hearing her previous talks uh Charlotte Ross started combined honors English and modern languages at newham College Cambridge and for a master of studies in modern language is a ballial College Oxford before completing a PhD at University of Warwick she's currently a reader in gender sexuality and cultural studies at the University of Birmingham um in the UK where she's also head of the Department of modern languages her research focuses on how bodies gender and sexuality are understood constructed and represented in socio-cultural context she has widely published on a range of issues among other things she's the author of two monographs Primo Levi's narratives of embodiment containing the human published in 2011 and eccentricity and sameness discourses on lesbianism and desire between women in Italy 1870s to 18 1930s which came out in 2015. she's also published numerous articles and chapters and co-edited several books and journal issues including the volume incorporate parties in post unification easily um and it's a special issue of gender sexuality easily on queer Italian cultures edited with sa Smite and Julia Heim her work is has been funded by the British Academy the lever home trust and the UK artists and Humanities research Council she is senior co-editor of the Journal of Italian Studies her current research project in collaboration with Sylvia and toza is entitled cultural discourses on desire Between Women a queer comparative analysis and explores literary narratives of queer queer women in Italy France and the UK in the 1920s 30s and the title of her talk today familias Familia queering the natural family so as I was saying this is very much research that's live and in progress I've done a little bit of work in this area and I'm looking forward to developing it more in the future so comments and suggestions afterwards are very much welcomed so today I want to talk about the idea of the family and the way it is being defined and redefined by a series of different groups and actors in Italy now perhaps the dominant image of what is constituted by a family in European culture is as you can see some of the pictures on the screen here that of a married mother father and their biological children and indeed for many people that resonates with their experience happily or unhappily for others that is a norm and a model to be imposed and protected at all costs but for many other people still that model of family does not correspond to their own lived experiences their own needs and desires it is CIS heteronormative patriarchal outdated and exclusionary and I'm going to begin by providing some context summarizing a few debates that are very much live contested and unresolved as they relate to the Italian context within the EU there are strong feelings and opinions about what should constitute a family but many of those views are highly problematic discriminatory and not based on any clear legal grounding I'll try to pick a pathway through these thorny debates and highlight some key issues and I'll then focus on how social practices activism and cultural representation May contribute to evolving understandings of the family and how this might be or has already been redefined I'll show how various discursive oppositions have formed including between those who want same-sex families to be recognized and those who reject this claim but also between those who think that same-sex marriage is a form of assimilationist homo normativity and those who see it as an opportunity to redefine family I'll suggest that here as elsewhere polarized debates have a tendency to collapse nuance and silence some key elements The Way Forward I'll suggest May lie in ensuring that a wider variety of perspectives are heard and in making this argument I'll engage with evolving Reflections on Queer as an anti-normative perspective so let's start with the idea of the family over the past few decades there have been many heated exchanges in Italy about perceived threats to the so-called natural family what has provoked this well possibly many things this is just one of the triggers in 1994 the EU approved a resolution to call upon member states to improve legislations to protect homosexuals and to expand the legal interpretation of a family so this is from that document the European Parliament calls for recognition of the rights of homosexuals to marry one another and calls for the community to become a party to the European Convention of human rights of 1956 as envisaged in the commission's program of work for 1990 and in that context to Advocate a broad interpretation of the concept of the family so as to ensure that de facto heterosexual and homosexual unions are expressly equated with de juriate families as regard to both their rights and their obligations so in light of this some LGBT activists and politicians then proceeded to Lobby the Italian government to develop this kind of legislation a different form of response to the EU recommendation in Italy was that of the then Pope John Paul II who made this statement what is morally unacceptable is the legal approval of homosexual practice the resolution of the European Parliament asked one to justify a moral disorder and we have come across the idea of the disorder in my previous lecture when I talked about Mary's Ferro and the idea of an internal disorder as a kind of code for homosexuality as an illness the bond between two men or two women cannot be a real family and even less can such a union come to such a union be attributed the right to adopt children without family so here we have the official position of the Vatican with a homophobic rhetoric that was quickly replicated in many Catholic and other Publications and continues to Echo today same-sex couples cannot marry constitute a family or adopt children according to National Law this discourse as I said is often repeated by politicians even much more recently here we have Lorenzo Fontana in 2018 when he was Minister for the family and disability declaring that gay and lesbian parents do not exist in the eyes of the law is and interestingly as we can see from the headline of this paper the discourse denying the legal right to recognition for same-sex families has also become enmeshed with the sort of victimization people who take this homophobic position and seek to discriminate against what have come to be called rainbow families families also assert loudly it's actually they themselves who are the victims of the attack indeed in their view the so-called natural CIS heteronormative patriarchal family structure itself is under threat so there are some associations who take the stance publicly and have organized a large scale mobilizations and have a strong social media presence one such Association is Family Day which has run National events to publicly assert the rights of this viewer family uh their slogan one of their slogans is Defender protect our children from what or from whom from the Specter of the gay Lobby who allegedly want to deny their children's right to have both a father and a mother as well as their rights not to be educated about the importance of social inclusivity and respecting diversity for example now obviously these statements and these positions are deeply problematic in that they reinforce an essentialist heteronormative model of the family they also conveniently ignore some quite alarming problems within the institution of the his heteronormative patriarchal family form for example we might just think about the awful statistics about domestic violence in Italy is that figures show that in 2021 74 women were killed by a male partner or ex-partner would it not be better for women and children if Family Day tackles heterosexual male violence within the so-called natural family leave that open question there 's another movement The Sentinel empty standing watches an organization that adopts an allegedly non-violent approach to protecting what it calls civilization through silent protest in public squares in their written Communications social media and website the organization largely focuses on framing same-sex parents and lgbtq plus individual as rabid and destructive while the sentinela or watches are peaceful reasonable and in line with the natural order we read that they are defending themselves and their children against quote key Wallace identity now there are some really excellent analyzes of these kinds of mystifying by jupitive rhetoric um by published by Scholars like Sarah Lorenzo Bernini and Eric Lewis Russell this is crucial work which shows how lgbtq plus people are misleadingly discursively constructed as an actively aggressive enemy which is endangering uh children against this position we have activist groups like familiarcobaleno who take the line that all different family forms deserve respect these might include for example lgbtq plus couples who become or are seeking to become parents using reproductive Technologies parents who had children in a heterosexual relationship but now identify as lgbtq Plus or lgbtq plus individuals who are or wish to become parents adoptive parents and Blended or recomposed families they argue that families are not based on a particular form but they're based on love they're working to propose new legislation extending marriage to lgbtq plus people including the right for a parent to adopt a non-biological child they work with communities and schools to encourage greater awareness of rainbow families and the importance of age-appropriate inclusive education about this they disseminate the message of Decades of sociological research that has shown how far from being potentially dangerous to Children same-sex or queer parents can actually have a really positive impact on their children and give them social advantages often such children are more open-minded than their peers who have heterosexual parents for example and indeed recently Scholars Scholars have suggested it's no longer helpful to be asking these same questions are the kids all right do same-sex parents somehow damage their children instead Scholars have started to say well instead of thinking how lgbtq plus families are different and potentially risking stigmatizing them it would be better to think about how why and to what effect heteronormative Society constructs non-normative families as different perhaps that's a more failure question now now interpretively in Italy the campaign for same-sex marriage has come to dominate Pride parades and lgbtq plus activism as well as political debate in recent years legislation has changed a little to open up the idea of family to some extent with civil Partnerships which came into force in 2016. but the legislation on non-birth parents for lesbian gay and queer couples is still deeply inadequate leaving many parents and children unprotected by the law so that is the context for one opposing set of Demands about the family on the one hand we have a normative essentialist model of family associated with the Vatican and certain branches of Catholicism and on the other Familia cobaleno and their supporters arguing for an opening up of the legal definition of marriage and the family to include same-sex and queer parents but if we come back to the original question of the 1994 EU resolution which calls on member states to extend the idea of the family and the right to marry to homosexuals that was the language that was used it's worth exploring further debates on this question within the lgbtq plus activist community and others have written like all other groups lgbtq plus activists are not homogeneous and there certainly was no clear agreement in the 1990s amongst those who are politically active on whether the campaign to enshrine rights via same-sex marriage was really the issue that everybody wanted to get behind since the 1970s left-wing activists including heterosexual ones have critiqued the concept of the patriarchal family they have called for radical change in how our intimate relationships are policed and determined by state legislation and economic incentives leaving those outside the normative family structure at a disadvantage family rights thereby become privileges since they are not open to all in the early 1990s during meetings of the national lesbian Association even before the EU resolution there was disagreement on this issue since many lesbians were against a political campaign that sought to assimilate into the patriarchal institution of the normative family they wanted individual rights to decide themselves whether they cohabited with their partner who could visit them in hospital who could receive their pension Etc they objected to the fact that for same-sex marriage that the campaign for same-sex marriage sanctions a normative monogamous relationship implying that other forms of relationship are inferior problematic and undeserving of Rights they wanted full citizenship on their own terms not only if they conformed to certain models of sexuality and relationships and this has been called by Scholars full intimate citizenship or full sexual citizenship and Alessio poncio has recently edited a special issue of the Journal of History which explores this topic in a range of contexts in really interesting ways this desire to redefine the family entirely has also been called by Sasha rosenale and others going beyond the couple Norm a process which involves imagining or developing forms of intimacy for single people friends group living beyond the heteronorm or dominant model of couple monogamy so here we have another set of polarized debates those lgbtq plus people who are campaigning for the recognition of same-sex marriage and those lgbtq plus people who find this position a simulationist and normative instead they want to reevaluate the parameters of sexual and social life much more radically and of course what I have summarized is one very small portion of a much more nuanced and complicated debate these objections have of course been voiced in other times in other contexts they're not unique to Italy or to this moment Gail rubin's works in the 1980s comes to mind on sexual hierarchies Reuben was problematizing the ways in which certain socially acceptable gays and lesbians who don't rock the boat of society too much were gradually gaining acceptance leaving others who Express themselves differently or live differently even more stigmatized and vulnerable in a related vein Lisa Duggan developed the com the concept of homo normativity which in some instances is exemplified by lesbians and gays who have campaigned for the right to join the military and get married from this angle some of these couples can be seen to expose to espouse quote a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions such as marriage but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized depoliticized Gay Culture anchored in Domesticity and consumption there we go now some lesbian gay couples are indeed homonormative in this sense but I think we need to bear in mind that there are many reasons why lgbtq plus people may have campaigned to get married and sometimes their human rights issues about citizenship about being free from persecution so I think we want to be really careful about making assumptions of what marriage means and I think we want to be really careful of making the assumption that that particular form of homonormativity while it should be problematized applies in a blanket way to a larger demographic Judith Butler picked up on this move towards polarization within the lgbtq activist community on this issue in a 2002 article that notes the importance of supporting disenfranchised couples and children and the dangers of thinking about sexuality and relationships only through the frame of a traditional family she highlights the danger of taking a single stand either for or against gay marriage since in her view this leads to political deadlock and forecloses the more important issue of how we might quote exercise power to change the terms by which such topics sexuality the family relationships kinship parenting are rendered thinkable and she asks a big question which I think is a question that we should keep asking ourselves are there other resources by which we might become recognizable or mobilize to challenge the existing regimes within which the terms of recognizability take place and of course there are other resources some in fact many Brave and brilliant people have tried and some would say succeeded to redefine the family or kinship in a way that challenges rather than just expands existing regimes indeed even before the EU resolution in 1994 in Italy there were many de facto same-sex families and queer kinship networks and the adult the idea of the family has always been much more variegated than some contemporary Protectors of the natural family would have us believe or acknowledge to paraphrase Eve Cedric a family might be queer when it's understood and lived as an open mesh of possibilities and its constituent elements aren't made or can't be made to signify monolithically to paraphrase Butler this is kinship as a fluctuating assemblage a doing not a being as shown by Scholars like cath Weston by ethnographic work in the lgbtq plus communities in the late 1980s the normative model of the family has already been deconstructed and redefined traditional gender roles Domesticity intimacy caring can be shared and are shared in innovative ways and problematic familial hierarchies can be deconstructed a family can be queer if it's a kinship network of choice rather than prescribed by Blood law and normative models of identity so here are a few examples from Italy first of all radical radical queers of the 1970s who tried various experiments with communal living we might think for example of the Familia reale or royal family described by popular makashano in antologaya published in 2007.

[00:21:09]she recounts Tales of her queer dissident companies comrades and irreverent friends in their parallel Mondo guyon they sought to live their transgressive lives to the full calling themselves La Familia reale building a queer kinship Network that was both an alternative family and a political group she writes is yesterday is so this is one example of an activist queer Network a kinship Network or we might call it a Familia so it may have originated beforehand but I came across this term familia in relation to 1990s lesbian debates about the idea of an alternative family of choice these lesbian activists use the term Familia using the negative prefix to hack the normative meaning of the word and instead to connote an alternative more radical vision for those who'd been chosen to that's sorry for those who had chosen to or who had been forced to cut ties with their families of origin usually due to homoe transphobic discrimination against them or an inability to come out and live their identities as they wished these networks were absolutely vital as we can see from popular's account they offered friendship advice political engagement care love a boost to self-esteem fun and erotic possibilities what is not to love now I engaged with these this take on an alternative family Network or familial or kinship Network in 2011 so just over 10 years ago when I carried out some ethnographic work with a community of lesbians and queer individuals in Bali a different form of Familia the association desiderandai originally uh a lesbian separatist group excuse me founded in 1992 had shared with the National Association archiele speaker their project for a future Collective Community for older lesbians and queer allies inspired by group holidays in a massaria or large Farmhouse and also communities they knew of abroad in Germany and Britain they wanted to find a way to ensure that they could continue to enjoy some kind of queer Community as they grew older I followed this up intrigued by their vision for a collective queer future and their desire to take matters into their own hands I contacted them I went to Barry and I interviewed about 20 people who were then in their 30s 40s and 50s and it was a really interesting project from which various motivating factors emerged about their desire to set up this project first of all there was a concern deriving from individual experience that state provision for older people was just inadequate heteronormative and would erase their identities as lesbians which they were carefully consolidating through Collective Association and have as Butler and others have written if one's identity is erased then life can feel unlivable it can be incredibly incredibly important to queer people to be able to actually Express themselves and be recognized as themselves secondly they had a desire to live together support each other and enjoy each other's company Beyond homophobic normative Society third a lot of them had broken ties with their families of origin they didn't want to have to give their possessions to the state or to family members with whom they had strained relationships they wanted to be able to choose who to give their goods to notably there's Familia and finally they had a desire to establish a space for cultural transmission to pass on their experiences to younger generations of lesbians so it's a really interesting project with many different facets and what emerged from the interviews that I conducted was a really resilient network of support and friendship that allowed for differences opinion changes of friendship and relationship but which provided assistance when needed the network had played a fundamental part in several members Journeys to self-acceptance after they'd suffered from homophobia in their families of origin or more broadly in society their name for their shared vision for a collective lesbian or queer future is lesbizio a pun on the Italian word for hospice when I conducted my interviews concrete plans as to how to actually realize this had gone a little quiet but what became clear to me while doing the interviews was that even if lesbitious are fully functioning lesbian or queer retirement community didn't quite materialize as planned a version of it or of a form of what causes de Ben Munoz might call Queer Futurity was already tangible through their kinship Network and it was already impacting on their present lived experience the humor that led to the creation of the name Elizabeth was infectiously palpable in the friendships and the relationships and the ways in which interviewees talked about each other humor was used as a way to forge alternatives to the position of marginalized disenfranchised isolated stigmatized melancholic queer which we see all too often in the cultural representation now there were also a few Illusions in this community about the challenges of setting up a project of this kind finances legislation Italian laws regarding inheritance potential fallings out disagreements about where it would be would it be closer to the city would it be out in the countryside what would it look like in a concrete shape but the Familia the network was already in place and in many ways we might argue this is no different to other activists or friendship groups perhaps but some interviewees did specifically differentiate about desiderandai and the lesbizio group and Archie lesboga for example saying that they found Archie laser speaker two two political and too uh rigid uh wanted people to get behind a particular position whereas in this Familia there was possibilities for people to disagree with each other and they could fall out but they would somehow get back together again because there were enough links between members of the group to bring them back together United in their desire for a different queer future they had created a supportive present interestingly none of those I spoke to had children perhaps through personal choice perhaps because of the difficulties of achieving this for lesbians in Italy about which more in a moment but several interviewees noted this as positive in comparison to the married heterosexual women friends with children they felt it gave them more freedom more time and energy to live as they wished to age as they wished following Jack Campbell's following Jack halveston we might say they are following their own queer time rather than a normative model of an appropriate way to dress behave socialize and live their intimate lives at 30 40 50 60 70 Etc so returning to the question of alternatives to or expansions of the normative family this bitsy I think is a compelling project creative fun supportive flexible queer intergenerational Community which has already been partially realized through a social network and indeed research on quote-unquote successful aging whatever that might look like has shown that for lgbtq plus people flexible support networks which enable continuous redefinition of the self and critical reflection on one's place in the heteronormative social cultural context are really positive they can enable a degree of resilience across the life course that is Happy healthier older queer people which is obviously something that we would like to see the shortcomings of the project of course relate to the legal situation of the individuals concerned as yet legislation against discrimination is inadequate and there are many other legal challenges which go beyond the scope of this talk similarly porpora's queer ship net queer kinship networks provided the foundations for decades of powerful activism friendship and fabulously queer cultural interventions yet there Still Remains significant issues with legislative voids to protect trans people in particular or to allow them the right to self-determination without the intervention of a judge so having looked at some queer kinship assemblages some doings that seem to move that seek to move beyond the normative family and I want to jump into a contested area otherwise known as anti-anti-normativity so queer theory for many has been defined as a shifting positionality against whatever is normative which critically interrogates institutionalized Norms we might think of the work of David Halperin Lee Edelman Judith Butler Eve Cedric and Anna Marie jagos who in different ways have critiqued normativity recently Robin Weidman and Elizabeth Wilson edited a special issue of differences which explores what they see as a tendency to make normativity the axiomatic foe of queer studies another one of these Polar Opposites and they wanted to explore something different the way that queer oppositionality risks collapsing any nuance within the norm they write and the citations on the on the screen if a norm is a more capacious event than one might suspect from touring queer Theory another issue arises what critical and political work is being done by anti-normativity our hypothesis is this anti-normative stances project stability and immobility onto normativity in so doing they generate much of the political tyranny they claim belongs over there to regimes of normativity for in taking a stand against normativity anti-normative analyzes must reduce the intricate dynamics of norms to a set of rules and coercions that everyone ought rightly to contest everyone and they asked what does queer inquiry do when it's critical bigger is constituted by something upper than an axiomatic opposition to Norms now other critics have similarly questioned the opposition that seems to have developed between a limited model of what a same-sex family might mean and particular Notions of queer life so this is Maggie Nelson this might be a slightly more straightforward for those of you who are unfamiliar with these ideas in her brilliant book The Argonauts Maggie Nelson critiques potential the tendency in a very similar vein to uh Wagman and Wilson to create an opposition between some obliquely evoked form of queer political authenticity as the radical way and on the other hand domestic assimilationism she calls this the tired binary that places femininity reproduction and normativity on the one side and queer resistance on the other and here she is taking issues specifically with some of Lee adelman's work which you may know can Parenthood not be queer she asks or can we queer Parenthood now while critically appraising discourses on lgbtq plus families it seems important to hold in our minds the possibility that same-sex Parenthood can retain a subversive Edge even if elements of the relationships depicted may appear to be aligned with the norm as Nelson argues it's impossible for anybody to be one thing over the course of their entire life whether normative queer or somewhere in between and perhaps the more nuanced critical engagement with what is considered normative might open up some common ground from which to further challenge specific CIS heteronormativity which in my mind is the real problem in a way that doesn't generalize about all relationships and parenting so I've begun looking at cultural discourses on same-sex families in Italy as a way to explore whether these ideas hold water what differences can we see in the various positions adopted and where might this take us and so far I found two clusters of cultural texts and I'm working on expanding my Corpus so all suggestions are welcome one group is novels representing same-sex parents and the other is memoirs by gay and lesbian parents and I plan to then enlarge this to look for more varieties of kinship networks in whatever form they're expressed so I'm going to start with the novel arguably the novel allows narrative exploration of a range of different perspectives it can cover long periods of time and is therefore an ideal form to convey nuance and I did find some nuance I also found a lot of dead parents which I have argued reinforced the cultural Trope of quote burying the gays that I talked about in my last lecture and this is the recurrent Trope of killing off in novels or Cinema queer or transgressive characters with various effects including restoring heteronormativity punishing these characters for a Pursuit transgression confirming queerness as inevitably linked to Melancholy and illness to date I've looked at five novels and I would welcome suggestions for more and I want to underline these are really interesting novels they're definitely worth a read you'll definitely get something out of them um but I was disturbed by the trend that at least one gay or lesbian parent dies in each novel and sometimes this has already happened on the opening Pages they're already dead at the start of the story and in my analysis of these novels I've drawn on Butler's work on morning and Melancholia to problematize the persistent Specter of grief and loss attached to Gay and Lesbian parenting which seems to close down any more Progressive visions of the future in which such family forms might actually flourish so I tried hard to look Beyond a superficial analysis the gay and lesbian parents die therefore these novels are problematic I started with that and I moved Beyond it and I did this through the work of Heather love who was those of you who've listened to my lectures you'll know that I find her work incredibly helpful and in particular her concept of the politics of damage so starting from the premise that quote modern homosexual identity is formed out of or in relation to the experience of social damage love suggests that we make this damage visible and we critique it rather than simply asserting it's an inevitable consequence for lgbtq plus people and this can then open up a new existential Pathways so it's a question of not just noticing it or not just letting it sit there but actively trying to move Beyond it and critiquing it tracing the events of the Nobles from this perspective didn't actually alter my view that the narrative choice to effectively erase the same-sex parents from even an imagined future is actually unhelpful and this I think is especially so in a context where there are figures of authority like Fontana stating explicitly that same-sex families don't exist or qualify as families I think people are writing about these issues have to take responsibility for the way that their words can have on people's lives and think carefully about how they're representing these the these these situations of course engage with problems of course engage with the reality of people's lives but a pattern like this just seemed to me to be really quite problematic my research on the representation of queer but especially lesbian characters in Italian literature of the last sort of 30 40 years has shown that the Trope of burying your gaze including or even especially in recent novels by some lesbian and queer identified authors is really problematically pervasive there is a long list of novels where lesbians die and it's not uh you know a a one-off instance however using Heather Love's idea of the politics of damage in a productive way also revealed some really compelling aspects of these novels which were worth a second look and I'm going to discuss just one example from alicators published in 2011.

[00:37:57]so in this novel Elena the protagonist is a closeted medical student struggling to come to terms with her lesbians she lives with her father Aldo her adopted brother matthiya Aldo and Matthias father Giovanni now dead that's the dead gay we're best friends in the 60s and were the ones left to look after the children when Elena's mothers died Ellen's mother died and Matthias mother abandoned them so a lot of parents disappearing and what are left are two siblings from different uh heterosexual families and their two fathers Elena is deeply depressed because she has a manipulative lover Viola and she attempts a sort of bungle suicide by driving her scooter into a wall luckily it goes wrong and she is able to recover and while she recovers she discovers that her father and Matthias father duvarian Aldo were actually lovers making the family not just non-normative as a blended recomposed family two single fathers with different children but more explicitly queer however this is only discovered when Elena's internalized homophobia has almost cost her her life and when the relationship between the two fathers is no more because Giovanni has died while Elena is recuperating from her accident on the island of panteleria she meets Liz a trans woman who berates her for her internalized homophobia and encourages her to get over herself accept her lesbianism live it more openly and conversations between the two of them and other queer people on the island show the difficulties that individuals may experience in a hostile context and the power of queer solidarity or a queer kinship Network that can help them to overcome this later in the novel we also see some other elements of Hope homophobia is not necessarily the instinctive response we see when learning about a relative homosexuality and this is the citation on the screen so when Matia and his stepbrother learns that Giovanni and Aldo his fathers were lovers he doesn't Finch maintaining it changes nothing about his sense of who he is or who they were or the environment that he grew up in SI di me cozmilo so I find this novel really interesting the queer parenting has already happened silently before we get into the action it's only really recognized as such after the fact we see how effective bonds are strong enough to whether the potential shock of an unexpected Revelation about a parent's sexuality and we see how our parents non-normative sexuality does not impact on their ability to bring up a child now obviously a lot of us already know this but the growing consensus around the messages uh of Family Day in the sentence and also various politicians who explicitly argue that gay and lesbian parents aren't breaking up the family in impacting negatively on children this shows us that a significant way that the population may have a more stigmatizing View in alicotta's novel we also see some signs of the more Progressive future Elena begins to come to terms with her own sexuality through learning about her father's personal life her own fears about her sexuality and of rejection by her family are proved to be unfounded and the narrative supports openness and honesty about identity so the alleged damage of queerness in the family is overcome turning now away from novels and to Memoirs of same-sex families several of these have now been published you may know some yourself this is just a few examples um and these Memoirs the ones I cite here by Julia Jani Claudio Claudio Rossi Marcelli and Josephine la delpha are interesting I think because they either develop from blogs or from email listserv communities um and they recount three couples Journeys to becoming same-sex parents the authors Are all uh in uh relatively public positions that are more or less in the Rossi Marcelli is a journalist who works for international Journey works in TV and Film Production and adelfa is an activist one of the founders and a former president of Familia cobaleno so they all have a bit of a sort of a public profile to Greater lesser degree and I'm not going to go into great detail here about these texts but I just wanted to note a significant difference that I discovered in these and the novels so first of all the parents are not dead spoiler you might be pleased I mean you may think I'm sort of being a little bit too light about a serious issue here but when it's such a pervasive Trope that has just been so Consolidated across Western literature for such a long time that the queers die and you see it being replicated in temporary tax and you think isn't it possible just to change the story a little bit and go in a different direction it was just really interesting to me that in the Memoir the stories of actual lived experience things were radically radically different so the Memoirs tell of struggles struggles with Italian law that severely restricts access to reproductive Technologies struggles with families of origin who are resistant to the idea struggles with hormones struggles with money struggles with the broader lgbtq plus Community but they're also really funny they're really affirmative they tell stories of network building they tell people how to build networks they tell people how to build networks online in neighborhoods kinship assemblages and sometimes in really unexpected places they show transversal support for same-sex parents from mechanics neighbors doctors in-laws teachers friends and relatives all over the place they narrate struggles with families of origin who are opposed to the idea of same-sex parents and they say they share advice this is how I got over it this is how I approach the issue this is how I got past it perhaps you can too they also show struggles with other broader members at other members of the broader lgbtq plus population including friends who to paraphrase ladelfa treat them like traitors to the cause because they decided they want to have children and possibly to try and get married in some way whether they do that abroad or or in some other way so there are texts that reflect on these difficulties but they offer hope this can be done they say even if it isn't easy and finally they also reflect in detail on the ethical considerations taken into account by all three couples before embarking on their Journey can we achieve this physically economically socially will their children be stigmatized by hostile context how might they best bring up their children in an open-minded way and ladelfa is particularly interesting on this she notes how one lesbian couple she encounters have told their children that she and her female life partner are just friends and that the biological father is dead appalled at this strategy which to her seems problematically duplicitous and imbued with internalized homophobia why should the child grow up grieving for the loss of a father that is not part of their family unit ladelfa in contrast argues compellingly for transparency on all levels both with children and with Society more broadly it is only by talking about same-sex parenting and different models of family and normalizing it that things can change and normalizing here does not mean normativity there is no straightforward Norm to which these families are conforming it's clear from these Memoirs these couples have chosen to be together they've chosen to struggle to have children and they do have an agenda their agenda is to demystify fertility treatments and same-sex parenting to make all of these issues relatable more familiar less threatening to show how they've got around loopholes and international law to show how they worked around some of the obstacles that normative societies have thrown in their way the texts critique the obstructive Italian laws they take aim at homophobic Prejudice quite directly these couples are parenting differently and seeking to educate their children and everyone else they encounter along the way to accept these new family forms and enlarge their ideas of what a family can be and so one way we might see these Memoirs are as examples of what Michael snedika has called queer optimism realistic with their eyes open to their problems but hopeful accounts of a challenging present which lays the ground for hopefully a less challenging more open-minded future so to conclude what I've tried to do is make sense of various different but related strands of an extremely complicated discursive context and social cultural situation I've critiqued the extremely homophobic and normative positions of the Vatican many italian politicians and associations like like a family day I've shown how there is more than one polar opposition in debates since not only the right-wing homophobes but also members of the lgbtq plus activist and academic community may also be opposed to same-sex marriage I've explored a few examples of queer kinship in Italy as alternatives to the normative family and tried to show how parenting and families are not necessarily always already normative and problematic they can be queered or redefined following on from the work by Sasha rosenell at Al about going beyond the couple Norm which I really recommend to you I entirely agree that societies would benefit from opening up space beyond the couple Norm for those who want to live in different groupings and not be discriminated against because of this this must not fall off the campaign agenda the rights of the individual also need much better protection urgently in Italy and it's a real tragedy that the uh that the alleged that the the ddl Zan didn't pass and it was also really upsetting to see how pleased so many politicians were when it was voted down now legislation is one way to achieve these kinds of changes but when legislative change seems incredibly slow or nigh impossible other helpful strategies to achieve queer livability may include the ones I've talked about building support networks developing queer kinship using cultural text as vehicles to normalize the fact that the shape and the constitution of the family in Italy is changing or for many has already changed now weigman and Wilson in that Reflections on anti-anti-normativity ask what does queer inquiry do when it's critical Vigor is constituted by something other than an axiomatic opposition to the norm what kind of questions might it ask what strategies might it pursue now one answer might be this it looks for transversal solidarity and resonances between more radical queer communities and those who might for some be seen to be aligned with the norm in some way from the 1970s she remembers how in these campsites her exuberant group arrived there were often arguments with the campsite managers and some families left shocked or in disgust but other families stayed out to solidarity out of curiosity or perhaps out of a conviction that there would be a lot of fun to be had later on and there was and popular notes that many of these families stayed in touch with the queers they met camping for many years to come so these kinds of experiences dialogue and connections across presumed differences are really vital if we had to keep up momentum for continued social change as Eve Cedric said queerness arises when our identities our perspectives are not monolithic and many of us well perhaps not radically queer are not one of the thick either I'm nauseous the family or our relationships be forced into a monolithic model cultural texts can play a part in opening up discussion about this Familia about queer kinship what I've sketched out today shows how I'm beginning to approach the subject which I plan to take forward in the near future and I think the next stage is more interactive texts looking at YouTube looking at social media and looking at the way in which Memoirs become interactions with the public and become a different kind of uh more uh more active vehicle for conveying a political message um but that's where I've got to it so far it's not easy but I think it's a really important subject for us to reflect on together so thank you very much for listening [Applause] thank you very much um do we it's always the floor is open for questions and if you are following us in the YouTube channel there's always a chat that where you can put your questions and jovano will relay them on our media manager working in the background any uh also comments one thing that I did it occur to me and I you know as the some of the company shows to say and encumber the better thought process so this is not something that I have really thought through but um me that in many you know as far as I know you know places like Canada the US the courts I've had it uh uh have led the politicians and I've moved far ahead of the politician in terms of um you know recognition of of same-sex marriage um and so they have you know the issues of human rights have come the uh how shall say the timidity of legislators to uh to address these issues and I'm wondering if that's not all one of the many problems I don't know if you know anything about how this translates in the Italian context where you know the uh legal processes are notoriously slow and I'm not sure there is as much of a space for the courts or women's issues but I really as I said I really don't know and I wonder if you know anything about whether there is this Phenom there is a you know an Italian sort of um version of this phenomenon if there's any debate on core activism if there is any as I would say here Court activism well um I'm not going to be able to provide details so uh apologies if this is a little bit vague but I do know that um so civil unions were um legalized in 2016 but as part of that legislation one of the articles about what was called stepchild adoption was dropped um because it was felt to be a step too far uh using the ideas coming from um the position of the Vatican and the position of other politicians um basically saying that uh it was just impossible and would be too corrupting for same-sex couples to parents children or to adopt children what that meant was for a lot of families they couldn't get documents that one of the parents wasn't legally uh related to the children they were bringing up and there was a bit of a void for a while until some local Mayors stepped in and effectively challenged the lack of national legislation by legislating at a local level changing birth certificates and recognizing the non-birth parent for um for same-sex couples and that has happened in various cities around Italy but not at a national level while that was happening in the two years between civil partners coming in and when that happened in around 2018 there were some court cases going forward and there are some researchers at the University of Verona some sociologists who've done some really excellent work on this um I can't off the top of my head remember the name of the project but if anyone's interested I can definitely put you uh in the right direction um but they found out that most of the court cases that had been taken were being won by um lesbian and gay couples so the non-birth parent or the social parent whatever we want to I called that person was managing to adopt the child in specific circumstances because it's a form of adoption when a child already has a living parent so it's a very unusual set of circumstances so most of those were going ahead but not absolutely all of them so there were some precedents being set by the court but they weren't it wasn't absolutely watertight um I know that there are lots of groups trying to develop improve legislation on protecting the rights of the individual the letter lenford which is a a really excellent organization of queer and queer Ally lawyers has been working with Familia covaleno to try and put forward some more uh another proposal of legislation for effectively gay marriage but they've also been working on the rights of the individual and they were also working on the do the alzan so there are various different kind of approaches like that that are going on but that's sort of beyond my sphere the the legal realm of it although there is some really really interesting work that's being done to try and sort out the problems um I mean it's often a case that people find their own way around the legislation um but that doesn't help you if you're being systematically discriminated against and you can't prosecute anybody or if you're you lose your job or you're losing out on a particular income which can have a really significant impact on your life so sometimes sometimes you can get around some certain issues by knowing people or by developing productive relationships with local institutions which is a form of kind of dialogue leading to people having more knowledge and barriers coming down and people helping each other but sometimes it's just not possible for that to be put in practice so I can't really give you much more detail than that yeah just uh you know because there's of course in North America there's been this an ongoing debate on supposedly activist courts and this kind of dance between that and then not so actress if you will Parliament so I will be interested to see what happens and in Italy where um the relationship between politics and the laws is perhaps perhaps more model than it is in North America I think that's where cultural texts have quite an important role to play because where there is a bit of a void they can step in and change people's attitudes for a lot of people the Discrimination that they're facing is on an everyday basis um and sometimes that can be mitigated by just developing friendships with people and getting to know them and and moving people beyond the feeling that this is absolutely something that I can't accept I can't have in my community to oh actually we've got quite a lot in common we share some of the same values um and and maybe some of those extreme views um effectively portraying for same-sex parents as rapidly trying to destroy the family perhaps that's a bit of exaggeration and not something that's borne out in in reality thank you thank you so much so I'm still thinking thank you uh mine is a theoretical question about being able to put it as well about the conversation on antenna tattoo I do find it like circus for Christ so I agree with you because as as clear folk we contaminate spaces facility to even our our taking advantage of a particular systems until until they noticed the emergence of an element is called capacity or Abuja and you certainly see that for instance with the transverse and if your community [Music] they want to talk for sale privilege and so do you see do you see that there is another language you see that there is importance to this tetheredness to actually relativity and so a critique to anti-entricle activities because proximity or Mutual can sort of take over if we don't stay grounded in that entire place I think it's important not to not to generalize and not to assume um and if people or institutions are expressing views or taking positions that are explicitly normative then that's something that needs to be problematized but where that's not the case then we should perhaps explore before we make assumptions about what's going on um I mean I think I understand their position um thinking here of perhaps members of the lesbian activist community in Italy who have been um felt very portrayed by the fact that the campaign for same-sex marriage has taken such precedent in the campaign agenda when they didn't really want that they wanted to fight for individual rights to go forward and that hasn't happened in the same way but I've spoken to some of these people and I've interviewed them over the years I've read things that they've published some of them have started boycotting Pride parades because they don't feel represented and I see where that position comes from and has some have some sympathy with it but I also feel that there has to be a way to take these conversations forward together and to understand that there are different ways of coming to a similar goal um I know it's not always easy but it feels to me like polarizing of these kind of debates isn't a helpful thing to do like Maggie Nelson I would also take issue with some of the scholarships such as Lee adelman's which seems to mix great contributions on some levels but on other levels there is you know a tendency to universalize about some issues they may have a great symbolic value but that also translates onto sweeping generalizations about a lot of people's lives and I think we have a duty to remain critical in our anti-normativity um I mean I always find myself going back to Sedgwick she talks about all of the various elements that might make our identities queer and she's very open uh for that to include heterosexual allies as well and I think there's a conversation to be had there um a lot of heterosexual families are doing parenting differently in a lot of heterosexual families um fathers are inhabiting their masculinity and their fatherhood differently um and I'm not going to start making a case for that to be an example of radical queerness but I think we have to think about that as part of this shift in terms of what intimacy can mean and what the relationships mean and I think developing Bridges and dialogue is a better way to go about things than by um kind of effectively risking implying that there are these polarized cams which is just not the case and so I think it's a question of theory needing to touch base with practice and lived experience perhaps more often I hope I've answered your question okay well if there are no other questions um I would first of all like to thank you all for coming or tuning in on YouTube I'd like to thank the people who help us with the organization and running these events Giovanna lizana here at uh with this in the media component of Lucinda Lee in in the office and of course I'd like to thank again Professor Charlotte Ross for a wonderful series of lectures for all her contributions to our community um you know the good thing about having uh go to visiting professors or visiting professors in general is that it's usually the beginning of a conversation that then continues so we look forward to many more opportunities to discuss all kinds of ideas with Professor Ross thanks again thank you very much [Applause] [Music] thank you