Intersectional Italy

This Special Issue aims to promote a reflection on the importance of deploying an intersectional analysis in the Italian cultural context—where it is still vastly undertheorized—to produce a multifaceted cultural analysis of different kinds of texts and representations Intersectionality, both as a theoretical framework and a methodological tool, has only recently been embraced in Italy (see, among others, Bonfiglioli et al. 2009; Perilli and Ellena 2012; Marchetti 2012; Merrill 2006, 2018; Kan 2021; Giovanni Bello 2020; MariniMaio, Bonifazio, and Nerenberg 2021), a country that has shaped its national identity around the presumed “chromatic norm” (Romeo 2012) of whiteness. Intersectional methodology was conceived in the context of Black feminism and feminism of Color in the United States and theorized by the Combahee River Collective (1977). Black feminists rejected the notion of universal sisterhood among all women and underlined the ways in which white women have historically benefited from their white privilege and have reproduced power dynamics in the relationship with racialized women. The term “intersectionality” was coined later by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) in the context of three legal cases in which the lack of an intersectional approach had led to the invisibilization of Black women. Such an approach focuses on the multidimensional discrimination that individual subjects and different groups of people experience based on their race, color, gender, and other axes of oppression (class, sexuality, religion, citizenship, nationality, age, etc.), which need to be taken into account in their intersection and simultaneous presence, rather than as separate categories. In Italy, the concepts of race and color have generally been under-represented in the social context at large and undertheorized in scholarly discourse and within feminist movements. Incoming migrations to Italy over the past 40 years have rendered Italian society more diverse than in the past. Black authors and authors of Color have emerged who analyse the intersection of gender, race, color, and class in a postcolonial perspective and identify processes of racialization of Black bodies as a colonial legacy.