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F.T. Marinetti'nin Fütürist Manifestolarında Erkekliği Queerleştirmek, 1909-1919

Year 2017, Issue: 7, 46 - 70, 15.02.2017

Abstract

Bu makale İtalyan fütürizminin
kavgacı kurucusu Filipo Tommaso Marinetti’ye odaklanmaktadır. Cinsel
vatandaşlık hakkındaki önkabulleri sorgulamak amacıyla, toplumsal cinsiyet ve
arzu, bedenler ve gösterimler gibi hegemonik konvansiyonları ele alarak erken
manifestolarının (1909-1915) queer bir okumasını yapacağım. Amacım,
Marinetti’nin yapıtına getirilen geleneksel eleştirileri yerinden oynatmak ve
genişletmek; manifestolarının, tutarlı bir şekilde cinsiyetlendirilmiş bir
heteroseksüel/homoseksüel ikiliğinin çevresinde sabitlenemeyen bir erotika
tarafından karmaşıklaştırıldığını savunmaktır. İlk olarak, Marinetti’nin
erkeksileşmiş kadınlığa verdiği destek ve kadınsılaşmış erkeklere yönelttiği
ret ile karmaşık bir hale gelen fırsatçı kadın düşmanlığının, toplumsal
cinsiyetin cinsiyetlendirilmiş bedenler üzerinden istikrarlı bir şekilde
hizalanışının imkansızlığını yansıttığını iddia ediyorum. İkinci iddiam,
Marinetti’nin homososyallik ve arzu arasındaki sınırlar konusunda hissettiği
kaygıların, tümü hipermaskülinitenin çatışma halindeki savlarına kodlanmış,
taşkın ve çoğunlukla şiddete meyyal bir homoerotizm ile örneklendiği ve
heteronormatif rahatlama ile vurgulandığı. Bunların, yüzyıl dönümünde, modern
cinsel kategorilerin ortaya çıkmaya başladığı ve uyumlu bir erotik rejim içinde
sınıflandırmaya kafa tutan bir karşıtlık mantığı içerisinde birleştiği bir
dönemde üretilmiş fırsatçı anlatılar olduğunu iddia ediyorum,

References

  • Aldrich,R. (1993). The seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, art, and homosexual fantasy. New York: Routledge.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Benedetti, A. (2012). The war diaries of Filippo Tommasio Marinetti and Ernst Junger. International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, 2(1), 226-252.
  • Berghaus, G. (2006). F.T. Marinetti: Critical writings. Translated by D. Thompson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  • Blum, C. S. (1990). Rhetorical strategies and gender in Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. Italica, 67(2), 196-211.
  • Blum, C. S. (1996). The other modernism: F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist fiction of power. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • 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.
  • Brady, S. (2015). John Addington Symonds, Horatio Brown and Venice: Friendship, gondoliers. and homosexuality. In V. P. Babini, C. Beccalossi, and L. Riall (Eds.), Italian sexualities uncovered, 1789-1914(pp. 207-227). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. New York: Routledge.
  • Connell R. W.(2005).Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Contarini, S. (2006). La femme Futuriste: Mythes, modèles et représentations de la femme dans la théorie et la littérature Futuristes (1909-1919). Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris 10.
  • Doan, L. (2013). Disturbing practices: History, sexuality, and women’s experiences of modern war. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Dudink, S, Hagemann, K, and Tosh, J. (2004).Masculinities in politics and war: Gendering modern history. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
  • Edelman, L. (2004). Queer theory and the death drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Felski, R. (1995). The gender of modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • Flint R. W. (Ed.). (1971). Marinetti: Selected writings. Translated by R. W. Flint and A. A. Coppotelli. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  • Fochessati, M. (2012).Broom and Futurist aristocracy: When the Futurist movement met the machineage. International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, 2(1), 69-103.
  • Foucault,M. (1985). History of sexuality, vol. 1. New York: Vintage.
  • Halberstam, J. (1998). Female masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Halperin,D. M. 1990. One hundred years of sexuality and other essays on Greek love.New York: Routledge.
  • Hemmings, R. (2015). Modernity’s object: The airplane, masculinity, and empire. Criticism, 57(2), 283-308.
  • Hewitt, A. (1996).Political inversions: Homosexuality, fascism and the modernistimagination. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
  • Houlbrook, M. (2013).Thinking queer: The social and sexual in interwar Britain. InB. Lewis (Ed.), British queer history: New approaches and perspectives (pp.134-164). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
  • Kanai, J. M. (2015). Buenos Aries beyond (homo)sexualized urban entrepreneurialism: The geographies of the queered tango. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 47(3), 652-670.
  • Kaplan, M. (2005). Sodom on the Thames: Sex, love and scandal in Wilde times. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
  • Katz, J. N. (1996). The invention of heterosexuality. New York: Plume.
  • Kristeva, J. (1982). Approaching abjection. Oxford Literary Review, 5 (1-2), 125-149.
  • Kunzel, R. (2008). Criminal intimacy: Prison and the uneven history of modern American sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Linkoff, R. (2013). ‘The young men who come down from Oxford and write gossip’: Society gossip, homosexuality, and the logic of revelation in the interwar popular press. InB. Lewis (Ed.), British queer history: New approaches and perspectives (pp. 109-133). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
  • Lusty, N. (2014). Introduction. In N. Lusty and J. Murphet (Eds.), Modernism and masculinity (pp. 1-18). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Lyon, J. (1999). Manifestoes: Provocations of the modern. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
  • Marinetti, F. T. (1998 [1909]). Mafarkathe Futurist: An African novel. Translated by C. Diethe and S. Cox. London: Middlesex University Press.
  • Merjian, A. H. (2012). A future by design: Giacomo Balla and the domestication of transcendence. Oxford Art Journal, 35(2), 121-146.
  • Mosse, G. (1985). Nationalism and sexuality: Respectability and abnormal sexuality in modern Europe. New York: H. Fertig.
  • Patriarca, S. (2010). Italian vices: Nation and character from the Risorgimento to the Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Perloff, M. (1984). Violence and precision: The manifesto as art form.Chicago Review, 34 (2), 65-101.
  • Perloff, M. (1986). The Futurist moment: Avant-garde, avant-guerre, and the language of rupture. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
  • Pursell, T. (2008).Queer eyes and Wagnerian guys: Homoeroticism in the art of the Third Reich. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 17(1),110-137.
  • Pustianaz, M. (2010). Qualchedomanda (sul) queer in Italia. Italian Studies, 65 (2), 263-277.
  • Rabinbach, A. (1992). The human motor: Energy, fatigue, and the origins of modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Re, L. (2009).Maria Ginanni vs. F. T. Marinetti: Women, speed, and war in Futurist Italy.”Annalid’ Italianistica 27: 103-105.
  • Schnapp, J. T. (1994). Propeller talk. Modernism/Modernity, 1(3), 153-178.
  • Sedgwick, E. K. (1993). Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Sedgwick, E. K. (1995).Between men: English literature and male homosocial desire New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Sedgwick, E. K. (2008). Epistemology of the closet. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Shorter, E. (2005).Written in the flesh: A history of desire. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
  • Silverman, K. (1992). Male subjectivity at the margins. New York: Routledge.
  • Sinfield, A. (1994).The Wilde century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the queer moment. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Spackman, B. (1994). Mafarka and son: Marinetti’s homophobic economics. Modernism/Modernity, 1(3), 89-107.
  • Spackman, B. (1996). Fascist virilities: Rhetoric, ideology, and social fantasy in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Tesho, A. (2010). Italian Futurist women. Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Round Table, 1-18.
  • Theweleit, K. (1987). Male fantasies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Wohl, R. (1994). A passion for wings: Aviation and the Western imagination, 1908-1918. Ithaca: Yale University Press.

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

Year 2017, Issue: 7, 46 - 70, 15.02.2017

Abstract

This paper focuses on the bellicose founder of Italian futurism,
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. I employ a queer reading ofhisearly manifestos
(1909-1915) to
question 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.

References

  • Aldrich,R. (1993). The seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, art, and homosexual fantasy. New York: Routledge.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Benedetti, A. (2012). The war diaries of Filippo Tommasio Marinetti and Ernst Junger. International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, 2(1), 226-252.
  • Berghaus, G. (2006). F.T. Marinetti: Critical writings. Translated by D. Thompson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  • Blum, C. S. (1990). Rhetorical strategies and gender in Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. Italica, 67(2), 196-211.
  • Blum, C. S. (1996). The other modernism: F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist fiction of power. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • 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.
  • Brady, S. (2015). John Addington Symonds, Horatio Brown and Venice: Friendship, gondoliers. and homosexuality. In V. P. Babini, C. Beccalossi, and L. Riall (Eds.), Italian sexualities uncovered, 1789-1914(pp. 207-227). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. New York: Routledge.
  • Connell R. W.(2005).Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Contarini, S. (2006). La femme Futuriste: Mythes, modèles et représentations de la femme dans la théorie et la littérature Futuristes (1909-1919). Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris 10.
  • Doan, L. (2013). Disturbing practices: History, sexuality, and women’s experiences of modern war. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Dudink, S, Hagemann, K, and Tosh, J. (2004).Masculinities in politics and war: Gendering modern history. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
  • Edelman, L. (2004). Queer theory and the death drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Felski, R. (1995). The gender of modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • Flint R. W. (Ed.). (1971). Marinetti: Selected writings. Translated by R. W. Flint and A. A. Coppotelli. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  • Fochessati, M. (2012).Broom and Futurist aristocracy: When the Futurist movement met the machineage. International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, 2(1), 69-103.
  • Foucault,M. (1985). History of sexuality, vol. 1. New York: Vintage.
  • Halberstam, J. (1998). Female masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Halperin,D. M. 1990. One hundred years of sexuality and other essays on Greek love.New York: Routledge.
  • Hemmings, R. (2015). Modernity’s object: The airplane, masculinity, and empire. Criticism, 57(2), 283-308.
  • Hewitt, A. (1996).Political inversions: Homosexuality, fascism and the modernistimagination. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
  • Houlbrook, M. (2013).Thinking queer: The social and sexual in interwar Britain. InB. Lewis (Ed.), British queer history: New approaches and perspectives (pp.134-164). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
  • Kanai, J. M. (2015). Buenos Aries beyond (homo)sexualized urban entrepreneurialism: The geographies of the queered tango. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 47(3), 652-670.
  • Kaplan, M. (2005). Sodom on the Thames: Sex, love and scandal in Wilde times. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
  • Katz, J. N. (1996). The invention of heterosexuality. New York: Plume.
  • Kristeva, J. (1982). Approaching abjection. Oxford Literary Review, 5 (1-2), 125-149.
  • Kunzel, R. (2008). Criminal intimacy: Prison and the uneven history of modern American sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Linkoff, R. (2013). ‘The young men who come down from Oxford and write gossip’: Society gossip, homosexuality, and the logic of revelation in the interwar popular press. InB. Lewis (Ed.), British queer history: New approaches and perspectives (pp. 109-133). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
  • Lusty, N. (2014). Introduction. In N. Lusty and J. Murphet (Eds.), Modernism and masculinity (pp. 1-18). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Lyon, J. (1999). Manifestoes: Provocations of the modern. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
  • Marinetti, F. T. (1998 [1909]). Mafarkathe Futurist: An African novel. Translated by C. Diethe and S. Cox. London: Middlesex University Press.
  • Merjian, A. H. (2012). A future by design: Giacomo Balla and the domestication of transcendence. Oxford Art Journal, 35(2), 121-146.
  • Mosse, G. (1985). Nationalism and sexuality: Respectability and abnormal sexuality in modern Europe. New York: H. Fertig.
  • Patriarca, S. (2010). Italian vices: Nation and character from the Risorgimento to the Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Perloff, M. (1984). Violence and precision: The manifesto as art form.Chicago Review, 34 (2), 65-101.
  • Perloff, M. (1986). The Futurist moment: Avant-garde, avant-guerre, and the language of rupture. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
  • Pursell, T. (2008).Queer eyes and Wagnerian guys: Homoeroticism in the art of the Third Reich. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 17(1),110-137.
  • Pustianaz, M. (2010). Qualchedomanda (sul) queer in Italia. Italian Studies, 65 (2), 263-277.
  • Rabinbach, A. (1992). The human motor: Energy, fatigue, and the origins of modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Re, L. (2009).Maria Ginanni vs. F. T. Marinetti: Women, speed, and war in Futurist Italy.”Annalid’ Italianistica 27: 103-105.
  • Schnapp, J. T. (1994). Propeller talk. Modernism/Modernity, 1(3), 153-178.
  • Sedgwick, E. K. (1993). Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Sedgwick, E. K. (1995).Between men: English literature and male homosocial desire New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Sedgwick, E. K. (2008). Epistemology of the closet. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Shorter, E. (2005).Written in the flesh: A history of desire. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
  • Silverman, K. (1992). Male subjectivity at the margins. New York: Routledge.
  • Sinfield, A. (1994).The Wilde century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the queer moment. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Spackman, B. (1994). Mafarka and son: Marinetti’s homophobic economics. Modernism/Modernity, 1(3), 89-107.
  • Spackman, B. (1996). Fascist virilities: Rhetoric, ideology, and social fantasy in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Tesho, A. (2010). Italian Futurist women. Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Round Table, 1-18.
  • Theweleit, K. (1987). Male fantasies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Wohl, R. (1994). A passion for wings: Aviation and the Western imagination, 1908-1918. Ithaca: Yale University Press.
There are 54 citations in total.

Details

Primary Language English
Subjects Creative Arts and Writing
Journal Section Articles
Authors

Janet Lee This is me

Publication Date February 15, 2017
Published in Issue Year 2017 Issue: 7

Cite

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.