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
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- 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