Research Article

Queering Virility in F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifestos, 1909-1919

Number: 7 February 15, 2017
  • Janet Lee *
TR EN

Queering Virility in F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifestos, 1909-1919

Abstract

This paper focuses on the bellicose founder of Italian futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. I employ a queer reading ofhisearly manifestos (1909-1915) toquestion presumptions about sexual citizenship by interrogating hegemonic conventions linkinggender and desire, bodies and performances.My goal is to disturb/extend traditional critiques of Marinetti’s work and make the case that his manifestos are complicated by an erotics that tends not to stabilise around consistently gendered heterosexual/homosexual binaries. I suggest first that Marinetti’s opportunistic misogyny, complicated by support for masculinised femininity and disclaim for effeminate men, reflects the impossibility of stable alignments of gender with particular sexed bodies. Second, Marinetti’s anxieties about the borders between homosociability and desire are illustrated by an effusive and often violent homoerotism, punctuated by heteronormative relief, and all encoded within belligerent assertions of hypermasculinity. I make the case that these are opportunistic narratives, produced during a decade at the fin de siècle when what we recognise as modern sexual categories were beginning to emerge and converge in oppositional logic, which defy classification in a coherent erotic regime.

Keywords

References

  1. Aldrich,R. (1993). The seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, art, and homosexual fantasy. New York: Routledge.
  2. Beccalossi, C. (2015). The Italian vice: Male homosexuality and British tourism in southern Italy. In V. P.Babini, C. Beccalossi, and L. Riall (Eds.), Italian sexualities uncovered, 1789-1914(pp. 185-206). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  3. Benadusi, L. (2012). The enemy of the new man: Homosexuality in fascist Italy. Translated by S. Dungee and J. Pudney. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
  4. Benedetti, A. (2012). The war diaries of Filippo Tommasio Marinetti and Ernst Junger. International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, 2(1), 226-252.
  5. Berghaus, G. (2006). F.T. Marinetti: Critical writings. Translated by D. Thompson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  6. Blum, C. S. (1990). Rhetorical strategies and gender in Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. Italica, 67(2), 196-211.
  7. Blum, C. S. (1996). The other modernism: F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist fiction of power. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  8. Blum, C. S. (2014). Marvellous masculinity: Futurist strategies of self-transfiguration through the maelstrom of modernity. In N. Lusty and J.Murphet (Eds.), Modernism and masculinity (pp. 87-102). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Details

Primary Language

English

Subjects

Creative Arts and Writing

Journal Section

Research Article

Authors

Janet Lee * This is me
United States

Publication Date

February 15, 2017

Submission Date

September 4, 2016

Acceptance Date

-

Published in Issue

Year 2017 Number: 7

APA
Lee, J. (2017). Queering Virility in F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifestos, 1909-1919. Masculinities: A Journal of Identity and Culture, 7, 46-70. https://izlik.org/JA57RN23ZZ
AMA
1.Lee J. Queering Virility in F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifestos, 1909-1919. Masculinities Journal. 2017;(7):46-70. https://izlik.org/JA57RN23ZZ
Chicago
Lee, Janet. 2017. “Queering Virility in F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifestos, 1909-1919”. Masculinities: A Journal of Identity and Culture, nos. 7: 46-70. https://izlik.org/JA57RN23ZZ.
EndNote
Lee J (February 1, 2017) Queering Virility in F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifestos, 1909-1919. Masculinities: A Journal of Identity and Culture 7 46–70.
IEEE
[1]J. Lee, “Queering Virility in F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifestos, 1909-1919”, Masculinities Journal, no. 7, pp. 46–70, Feb. 2017, [Online]. Available: https://izlik.org/JA57RN23ZZ
ISNAD
Lee, Janet. “Queering Virility in F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifestos, 1909-1919”. Masculinities: A Journal of Identity and Culture. 7 (February 1, 2017): 46-70. https://izlik.org/JA57RN23ZZ.
JAMA
1.Lee J. Queering Virility in F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifestos, 1909-1919. Masculinities Journal. 2017;:46–70.
MLA
Lee, Janet. “Queering Virility in F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifestos, 1909-1919”. Masculinities: A Journal of Identity and Culture, no. 7, Feb. 2017, pp. 46-70, https://izlik.org/JA57RN23ZZ.
Vancouver
1.Janet Lee. Queering Virility in F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifestos, 1909-1919. Masculinities Journal [Internet]. 2017 Feb. 1;(7):46-70. Available from: https://izlik.org/JA57RN23ZZ