Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Towards A Queer Southernism: The Role of Women And LGBT+ Groups in House Movement of Palermo
Davide Curcuruto
ABSTRACT:
This contribution explores the connections between territorial claims and gender issues, based on research conducted between 2021 and 2022 in Sicily and Catalonia. The focus is on the role of queer subjectivities in social struggles, particularly in housing movements, and how they build political alliances with feminized subjects outside traditional feminist circuits. Through an analysis rooted in Gramsci’s concept of subalternity, the text revisits the Southern Question using the lens of Subaltern Studies and decolonial perspective, emphasizing how Southern Italy is narrated through a colonial vocabulary, despite not being a colony. This approach helps avoid simplistic binaries and recognizes the whiteness of the South and its internal subalternity. The queer approach adopted challenges fixed identity ontologies and aims to subvert universalist critical paradigms, such as developmental feminism, which frames the struggle of bodies as a civilizational one. Thus, the contribution reflects the need for new frameworks to understand the complexity of feminized subjectivities and the relationship between gender and domestic space in Palermo, where the women of a marginalized district are not passive subjects, but leaders of the movement against the housing emergency in a contradictory context. In conclusion, the author proposes the idea of a new “Queer Southernism” as a theoretical tool to address the marginalization and subalternity of the South, understood as a body-territory and a space of resistance against dominant power narratives.
keywords: coloniality, inequality, intersectionality, margin, subalternity