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Valentina Pagliai Anthropology
Articles
Edited Issues and Book
Book Reviews
For a list of my conference papers click here
The Bad and the Good (Queer) Immigrant in the Italian Mass Media This paper examines the Italian media
response to the first case of refugee status granted to a gay man, on
the basis of sexual discrimination in his country of origin (Albania), and
compares it to a similar case involving
a lesbian woman from Iran, Pegah.
I argue that the analysis of homophobic discourse must consider the larger
playing field of racist and sexist discourse and the political field of the
construction of “otherness” and nation-state boundaries. I will examine how the
media and political parties manipulated the discourse on sexuality and human
rights to demonstrate the “lack of civilization” of the home societies of
immigrants to Italy, reinforcing racist positions against them. In particular,
I will consider the following: 1) The supporting answer to the Albanian man’s
case racialized and gendered Albanians, constructing them as morally inferior
(male) Others from which the feminized gay man had to be protected. 2) The
conservative press and parties’ general homophobic stances will be compared to
the positive and supporting answer they gave to the granting of refugee status
to Pegah. I will argue that such a contradiction can be understood in terms of
the racialized and gendered negative image of immigrants in general, and Muslim
immigrants in particular, continuously constructed by the Italian mass media. The
reasons that allow such cooptation of queerness, I will argue, must be
carefully considered. Moreover, the projection of homophobia onto the
non-European Other allowed the concurrent erasure of homophobic discrimination
in Italy.
Unmarked Racializing Discourse, Facework and Identity in Talk about Immigrants in Italy Based on research on racial formation processes in discourse concerning immigrants to Italy, this article argues that when racializing statements and stances are introduced as unmarked in a conversation, the co-participant is put in a position of having to readily agree or openly disagree – with the second option endangering face. Racializing discourses introduced as unmarked thus tend to obtain acquiescence from the co-participant. Unmarked conversational stances are part of a regime of morality and work at constructing shared identities around racist and racializing stances. The Italian mass media, by presenting racism as a natural answer to immigrants’ “invasion,” contributes to increasing the likelihood that racializing discourse will be produced as unmarked in everyday conversations. Instead of seeing racism as a stable belief in the mind of the individual, my data suggest that we should consider it as something the person does in interaction. The requirements of conversational rules of engagement, the needs of face, the relationship among the interactans, as well as their moral view, influences the participants’ response to racializing stances in interaction, and whether they might co-construct or oppose them.
Politics,
Citizenship and the Construction of Immigrant Communities in Italy
Conflict, Cooperation and Facework in Contrasto Verbal Duels Tuscan Contrasto verbal duels reveal a subtly complex relationship between conflict and cooperation, and between face and insults. In these duels, the performers use their arguing skills to debate the politics and morality of contemporary Italy, calling attention to contradictions. The artists cooperate in building disagreement and heightening wider social conflicts, while insults may contribute to a successful performance, thus enhancing face. The study of these duels requires a rethinking of concepts such as facework, politeness, cooperation and conflict. Here, I argue that what counts as face depends upon both the context and the audience, and that conceptualizations of face, (im)politeness, cooperation and conflict are at least partially ideological.
Conversational Agreement and Racial Formation Processes Recent scholarship on the working of racial formation processes underscores the intersection between discursive and structural components in the emergence of “race,” and the agency of individuals at the local and global level in articulating its meaning. This article offers a link toward understanding how racial formation processes operate in face-to-face interaction, by highlighting how people do racialization. Based on fi eldwork in Italy, it explores how conversationalists deploy agreement to co-construct a racialized image of immigrants to Italy. It is argued that this deployment leads to reinforcement of the racist stances expressed in the conversation itself, and possibly beyond it. In addition, the repeated occurrence of agreement during the co-construction of utterances produces a spiral effect around racializing discourse, a progressive deepening of the racialization itself. At the same
The Art of Dueling with Words: Toward a New Understanding of Verbal Duels across the World A common view of verbal duels is that they are exchanges of insults between young males, and a cathartic expression of aggression. In this article, through an examination of verbal duels worldwide, I will show that this view is overly restrictive. The heterogeneity of forms of verbal duels includes genres performed by men or by women; by kids, adults, or the elderly; staged or improvised; more or less structured, etc. At the same time, a finer analysis of insults is necessary to understand why, when insults are exchanged, this cannot be immediately connected to aggression. In particular, a distinction must be made between insults and “outrageous speech,” between the target and the recipient of insults, and between verbal duels and ritual insults.
Singing Gender: Contested Discourses of Womanhood in Tuscan-Italian Verbal Art In this article, we explore the presentation and contestation of discourses of womanhood in verbal art performance. In Tuscan-Italian Contrasto verbal duels the artists, both males and females, may impersonate female characters as they exchange insults between each other. In doing so, they deploy multiple discourses of womanhood to demonstrate their wit and verbal artistry and thus win the duel. As a consequence, they often subvert and contest "appropriate" female behavior as well as ideas of morality, which might be connected to those behaviors. This highlights the manipulability of discourses of womanhood to obtain particular goals. We analyze Contrasti performances where characters of mother-in-law and daughter-in-law are impersonated. We further argue that the contraposition of different discourses on stage increases the fluidity of gender as a category. In this sense poetic performances are revealed as a loci where perceptions of established gender roles and the connected moral order might be negotiated or destabilized.
Performing Hierarchies: Language and Gender in Italian Verbal Art “Women” is a discursively constructed category that exists inside social relationships. This becomes evident when we focus our inquiry on the construction of hierarchies among women in the context of the family. Women may uphold or oppose ideas of gender and gender roles in a strategic way, to obtain or maintain power. This paper draws on research on the performance of the Contrasto, a form of Italian verbal duel. In those Contrasti which require the performers to do “being a woman,” the artists manipulate ideological portraits of “femininity,” subverting them and thus negotiating “appropriate” female behavior. In performance, language is used to articulate power hierarchies among women. The characters represented are always “women-in-relation-to” somebody or something, or “women” as defined by particular kinds of kinship roles; these relationships in turn engender a standing in terms of social power.
Poetic Dialogues: Performance and Politics in the Tuscan Contrasto. Performance can represent politics in a way that empowers the audience, transforming the context from one only marginally political into one in which relevant political decisions may be taken. In the Contrasto, a Tuscan genre of verbal duel, the constant articulation of a dialogue between two points of view allows the artists to dispute social behaviors and political views, while “veiling” their opinions through the formal structure of the genre.
Lands I Came to Sing: Negotiating Identities and Places in the Tuscan Contrasto. This article on a genre of Tuscan Italian verbal art, the Contrasto, uses performance as a key to look at the connections between ethnic identity and place. The Contrasto takes its name, “contrast”, from its humorous representation of a verbal duel among entities, people or ideas. Structurally, it is formed by a series of chained Octets, in hendecasyllables. After an initial discussion of the current definitions of ethnic identity, the article is articulated in two parts. First, through the analysis of the “openings” of several Contrasti, I will show how a “repertoire” of ethnic identities becomes evident in the way the artists choose to represent themselves across contexts. These identities are connected to place. They are instead connected to towns, villages, valleys and mountains, monuments and historical events and legends. Tuscan ethnic identities emerge in the dialogue between the poets and their public. In the second part of the article, the in depth analysis of a Contrasto furnishes a key to understand how performance names and defines, but also contests, definitions of places and the associated identities. Performance brings to view the layers of complexity of ethnic identity, warning us against fixing and simplifying descriptions of it.
In Rhyme I Will Answer You: Verbal Fights and the Poetical Construction of Politics in the Tuscan Contrasto Starting from the analysis of a genre of Tuscan verbal art, the “Contrasto”, this paper shows the articulation of politics and language in verbal dueling. The bipolar structure of this genre always requires that two opposite voices may be heard, and both in turn may be attacked. This allows the artists to voice opinions on social behaviors and political decisions as well as dispute them in the public context of the stage. Through this analysis, emerges the potentiality of art as a means of reflection over social events and expression of people’s voices.
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CUNY Hunter College
UCLA Department of Anthropology
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Last updated 8/31/2011