In the wake of emergent feminist interventions of the 1960s, the student and worker movements of 1968, and the Stonewall riots in 1969, by the 1970s the politics of queer life in Italy had undergone a radical change. No longer willing to accept homosexuality as a pathology, the gay liberation movement, and the writers and intellectuals in its orbit, begin to reconceptualize the stigma that had been attached to them in the form of perversion. And yet, rather than engaging in a clear-eyed rejection of perversion, a number of anti-homophobic militants and intellectuals incorporate it into their politics as an analytic intervention and aesthetic organizing principle. This talk will address this historical shift through literary, theatrical, and philosophical examples to argue that in the 1970s perversion becomes not only a key political concept for queer movements, but that its implementation as analytic and aesthetic is a form of queer materialism.
Matthew Zundel is Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Miami University. They are a comparatist whose research connects critical theory, performance studies, and queer critique in and beyond Italy, between the 20th and 21st centuries. They are also a translator, having focused especially on publishing works of queer political philosophy, including Lorenzo Bernini's The Sexual/Political: Freud with Marx, Fanon, Foucault. At the moment, they are working on two book projects. The first is a collected volume of interviews and essays that critically consider the history, practice, and theories of queer archives in Italy. The second is their first monograph, Towards a Gay Communism: Queer Materialisms and the Ends of Perversion in 1970s Italy, which investigates the emergence of perversion as a keyword for queer resistance during the 1970s and its encounter with the frames and language of Marxism. Their writing has appeared in gender/sexuality/italy, Annali d’Italianistica, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Barricade, Passato e Presente. Rivista di storia contemporanea, and the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies.
