Exposing One’s Body: A Response to fuori. Essays by Italian/American Lesbians and Gays

 

I miss you of course,

but you know that part. The queer thing is,

Tuscany has already started to be

a dream again, even to me. . . . (Monette 20)

 

“This [essay] is about me because I am one of its subjects” (Walkerdine 310). As Valerie Walkerdine reminds us in her recent “Subject to Change Without Notice,” modern theories on the subject and on its alleged death are based on a fundamental, albeit denied, autobiographical element. Walkerdine under­scores that “the traditional boundaries between subject and object have broken down and that this means that our own subjectivity is formed like that of those we research” (310). The implications of such a statement are vast. If the Cartesian self existed as long as it relied on an undiscussed and indisputable auto-referential­ity, how can we make an attempt to investigate the “remnants” of a dead subject? How could we narrate our own occurred death?

Notions of death, of occurrance, of “remnants” rely on an essen­tialist assumption, i.e., on the presumption that a “core,” a “gist” of a self exists and/or existed in a given time in a given place. However, it is almost superfluous to remember that postmodern thought sees the self as “a discoursive phenomenon, not an essen­tialist one” (Tseelon 120). Postmodernism sees the subject as per­formance, “embodiment of theatricality,” as a linguistic game (Bell and Valentine 156). The subject is thus what s/he writes about her/himself. According to Postmodernism, the subject is that awareness that the act of writing grants the self. In other words, the subject is also/primarily the stories/histories that have nurtured the image s/he has of her/himself. This is why, more than theorizing on an abstract notion of subjectivity, the six compelling essays of Fuori. Essays by Italian/American Lesbians and Gays are characterized by a distinct autobiographical form.

If, as Paul Ricoeur reminds us, the subject is as long as s/he nar­rates her/himself, we might infer that subjectivity, or better yet, the act of formulating one’s own subjectivity is a solipsistic pro­cedure. The act of forming one’s own subjectivity would thus recall Wittgenstein’s notion of “private language,” a discourse whose referentiality lies exclusively in itself. However, the six essays/narrations of Fuori clearly contest such a view. The six narrators are aware of the fact that they are performing a double act. On the one hand, they recount their own stories/identities in order to summon an “image” of their own selves. On the other, they know that their stories are “exposed” to the reader; their stories/portraits/identities must “make sense” to the reader.

In order to clarify this fundamental point we might refer to Lévinas’s notion of alterity. In Autrement qu’être ou au-dela de l’essence, Lévinas holds that the subject is “prey” of the Other; the subject is “persecuted” by the Other (125–63). The Other both grants and subtracts sense to the subject. The subject, Lévinas underscores, can never avoid the Other’s “face” (visage). In com­posing her/his own identity the subject “looks at” the Other. Like Sherazade, the subject constantly asks the Other to “listen to” her/his story/identity in the attempt to neutralize the Other’s power of annihilation.

However, a crucial element must be borne in mind. Whereas the subject is able to “observe” the Other’s face, i.e., the Other’s body, the subject cannot see her/his own face. As Deleuze says about the concept of subjectivity in the Baroque era, “[the subject] is not exactly a point but a place, a position, a site . . . a subject will be what comes to the point of view, or rather what remains in the point of view” (19). It is apparent that the point of view in question is that of the Other, who “observes” the “remnants” of the subject’s discourse/identity/body. The subject narrates her/his body without being able to “see” it.

This contradiction is apparent in the six essays of Fuori. What does it mean to be both Italian, Italian American, Italian/Amer­ican, and gay Italian, gay Italian American, gay Italian/Ameri­can? Could one simply say, as Rachel Guido deVries writes in Fuori, that to be “Italian” means to be “eye-talian” (83)? In other words, does one need to “look” Italian to be Italian? And what does it mean “to look Italian,” or for that matter “to look gay Italian or gay Italian/American”? In the expression “eye-talian,” one summons the Other one more time, that is, what the Other expects us to “look like.” We may synthesize this point with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s words: “[the subject is constructed] through a slow and rather complicated feedback mechanism that I would summarize in the phrase: ‘Will I be able to recog­nize myself if I?’” (18). The Other is thus nothing but a disquiet­ing “if”, i.e., our conscience of “being exposed,” of possessing a physicality that exceeds any limitation/narration. If, as Deleuze states, “the act is what expresses the self,” we may infer that our “exposedness” is unavoidable and subjected to a constant act of reinterpretation (70).

This brief response to Fuori is structured as follows: first, I will analyze how the six authors relate to the ambiguous concept of the Italian and Italian/American identity; second, I will examine how they describe the interaction/confliction between their ethnicity and their being homosexuals; finally, I will offer my contribution to the debate concerning ethnicity and sexuality by briefly “narrating” my own identity as a gay “Italian/Ital­ian” who moved to the States some years ago and has felt com­pelled to ponder what the act of re-writing one’s own identity/ image actually means and entails.

The six authors of Fuori. Essays by Italian/American Lesbians and Gays construct their narration using two major components: on the one hand, bits and pieces of memories, linguistic debris, rem­nants of a past that they voluntarily attempt to put together (see Deleuze 69). Philip Gambone scatters his essay “Learning Again the Language of Signori” with expressions that he, as a child, heard in his family: “‘Sempre fa’ ‘na bella figura,’ my grand­mother would admonish me . . .” (63); “Nana punctuated her sen­tences with words and phrases—cazzo, merda di puttana, ‘a fess’ a sorella—whose meanings I did not always know . . .” (68). The six essays are replete with the words of old grandmothers and the figures of macho abusive fathers, submissive mothers, and young gays devastated by an “unbearable loneliness” (18), as Tommi Avicolli Mecca puts it, in an intriguing mixture of English, Italian, and Italian dialects.

On the other hand, the six authors strive to frame these “remnants” into an all-encompassing, idealistic picture of “Ital­ianity.” As Mary Jo Bona points out in her brilliant introduction, “[l]ike other ethnic and racial groups in America, Italian Ameri­cans have been subjected to stereotyping” (9). However, it is important to stress that Italian Americans themselves have “seen” their own identity through those very stereotypes. For instance, Bona considers the concept of family a fundamental element of the Italian identity: “Not only economically and spir­itually, but metaphorically the family centrally influences the ethnic identity of Italian Americans” (3). As we will see later, the concept of “family” plays a crucial, and extremely negative, role for the six gay authors of Fuori. It is actually their being part of a famiglia that triggers their questioning of the concept of “Italianity” itself. Strictly connected to that of the “family,” other stereotypes “blur” the image/identity/narration of the six authors. For instance, Giovanna (Janet) Capone states:

 

Eating dinner alone gives me another reason to feel disap­pointed and angry with the demise of my four-year rela­tionship with a woman I really loved. But, even more than that, eating dinner alone feels like a symbol of my capitu­lation to American culture and my assimilation as an Ital­ian American. (31)

 

The act of eating alone seems to deny Giovanna Capone her Ital­ian identity. According to this cliché, Italians are supposed to eat together, with the other members of the family. As Capone clearly states, for her eating alone symbolizes her “assimila­tion,” i.e., the progressive loss of her Italian “image.” Therefore, we may say that her narration recounts the “fading away” of what she imagined her face and body “looked like,” since, as we have pointed out, it is only the Other who, by looking at us, grants us a “face,” a visible body.

However, the most important stereotype the six writers of Fuori feel compelled to examine in a literal or metaphorical manner is their relationship with the Italian language. Accord­ing to Mary Cappello,

 

“Italian” . . . is the language I do not have access to and yet which provides the terms by which I will be named, accused, interrogated.

   “Italian” is the essence that I fear betraying in the expo­sition of lesbian desire.

   “Italian” is the route to the elders, who, the family assumes, are better off not knowing what they cannot understand about their third-generation Italian/American offspring. (93)

Cappello describes a fundamental identity contradiction. For her the Italian language possesses a fantasmatic nature. Italian is the idiom that could grant her some sort of “visibility.” How­ever, she knows that this is an impossible task, imposed by the Other in order to deny her an image of her self. Cappello cannot speak the language in which she is “accused” and “interro­gated.” Accused and interrogated by whom?, one may ask. “Ital­ian” is the “route to the elders,” Cappello adds. It is apparent that the act of questioning, accusing, interrogating is performed by the subject herself against herself. In other words, the Italian essence, as Cappello says, lies in the language that an Italian American cannot pronounce. This essential, albeit fantasmatic, negation jeopardizes the nature of Cappello’s Italian/American identity.

What an Italian American may achieve is the imperfect remembrance of a “vulgar dialect,” as Philip Gambone bluntly puts it:

 

During college . . . I studied Italian. Although I had grown up hearing “Italian” and speaking a little of it, I learned in high school that this language of my grandparents was really Neapolitan—a “coarse, vulgar dialect,” it was explained to me. (64)

 

Speaking and/or hearing Neapolitan in fact had “deceived” Gambone. Instead of granting him an acceptable, visible, iden­tity/body, this “vulgar” dialect undermined the author’s confi­dence in the image of his self as a third-generation Italian American.

The six texts of Fuori recount their authors’ impasse vis-à-vis the narration/image of their Italianity. To solve this dilemma one might simply question the actual relevance of one’s own ethnicity. As Gambone writes,

 

I don’t feel any particular affinity with Italian Ameri­cans. The people who are my true paesani, my true compari are not those with whom I share a common ethnic blood-line but those with whom I experience a consanguinity of education and interests and ways of being in the world. (62)

 

However, the concept of one’s own ethnicity constantly comes back as an unsolved inquiry. The act of distancing oneself from a troubled/troubling ethnicity is moot. After stating his “differ­ence” from other Italian Americans, his not “being like them,” Gambone cannot help but ask himself:

 

How do you separate? How do I distinguish what in me is “typical” Italian American from what was specific to my family? Or what is “typical” gay and what unique to my experience? Or what is “typical” gay Italian American from what is just plain garden variety gay? What part of the whole person I am today is “real” me . . .? (64)

 

Questioning where the “real” me resides brings us back to the notion of “body,” “face,” which is non-visible to us. The subject is blindly exposed to the Other, and even the stereotype, “what is typical in me,” does not offer the self a stable bodily image.

As Gambone suggests in the above passage, the six writers of Fuori must face another crucial aspect of their identity/body, i.e., their homosexuality. Not only do they attempt to come to grips with the ambiguous notion of Italianity, they also strive to characterize, to pin down the essence of their gayness. Histori­cally speaking, both their ethnicity and their sexual orientation have been stereotyped and humiliated. The six gay and lesbian Italian Americans of Fuori, in fact, face an unsolvable predica­ment. On the one hand, they try to depict a plausible image of their selves, both as gays and as Italian Americans, by recounting the ways these two elements have been interacting in their lives. On the other, they cannot help but realize that no possible dia­logue exists between their ethnicity and their sexuality. Their Italianity denies/erases their gayness, and conversely, their being queer undermines their participating in an Italian commu­nity.

As a result, the six writers of Fuori see their identity ques­tioned twice and in two different manners, both by their being gay and Italian, and by the conflict between the two elements. Giovanna (Janet) Capone synthesizes this point as follows:

 

. . . I often feel torn in half. It feels like I’m Italian in New York, and a lesbian in California. . . . How many times have I wondered: to which “family” do I most belong, the lesbian/gay community of San Francisco . . . or my Italian American family in New York, . . . the family into which I was born, but the family where I too often feel invisible and isolated as a lesbian? . . . The fact is, my Italian self is at war with my lesbian self. (36–38)

 

Capone clearly depicts a split self; an image/body dramatically questioned and denied. The author’s last resort is to take on two different and contradictory identities, and to risk turning into two personae.

However, the narration of one’s self is not “written” once and for all. Even though they are aware of the fact that the conflict between their sexuality and their ethnicity cannot be solved, in the course of their lives the six writers of Fuori have come to em­phasize different aspects both of their sexuality and of their Italianity. In other words, notions of gayness and of “being Ital­ian” are in constant flux, offering unexpected nuances that support the six writers in their attempt to merge the two clashing ele­ments. For instance, after having struggled with her being a les­bian and Italian for a long time, Theresa Carilli came to see in her ethnicity a powerful, political asset:

 

In graduate school, I came out as a Sicilian-American, understanding that there is something unique about my relationship to the world because of my ethnicity. I finally understand that I approach the world with a set of Sicil­ian rules and values. (59)

 

However, one could easily undermine Carilli’s statement. What are the “Sicilian rules and values” she speaks about? Which Sicily does she have in mind? The contemporary Sicily, which is slowly healing its social and political wounds, or the mafia-dominated and culturally isolated island of the beginning of the century? What is the uniqueness of her ethnicity? Isn’t she indi­rectly referring to the worn-out stereotypes concerning Sicily and its culture? Isn’t she projecting a reassuring, albeit clichéd, image on her self, in order to attain a reasonable compromise between two contrasting identities?

In any case, what is essential to stress is the intrinsic instabil­ity of allegedly permanent concepts or essences, such as “Italian” or “gay.” However, we have also seen that, deprived of any firm image of the self, the six authors of Fuori cannot help but associ­ate their identity with uneasiness and disquiet. The subject’s urge to reflect her/his self in a visible/tellable mirror/image, in a socially/historically well-defined/definying identity, is re­peatedly frustrated. As Lévinas would say, the subject looks at the Other who is looking at her/him. The subject has blind sight. S/he sees without seeing; s/he only perceives the act of being perceived, like a blind person walking down the street who feels that the world is watching her/him. As a result, even the act of recounting one’s identity is doomed to fail. From a narra­tive standpoint, the narration of the self is a “failure” primarily because it lacks any closure. More than recounting a linear evolu­tion of events, the self tells and denies, piling up contradictory details, memories, epiphanies.

As a gay Italian who immigrated to the States some years ago, I have questioned my identity in a manner similar, but not identical, to that of the six writers of Fuori. I have used the term “immigrated,” even though someone might find it inappropriate for a university professor. However, I am an immigrant. Let me summarize my “story” very briefly. When I was twenty-two, my father died of a sudden stroke. My mother, a “typical” Italian mamma, had never worked in her life. My two younger brothers were still in school. Although I held a university degree and was fluent in five languages, it took me more than two years to find a very humble job. Simply, due to the fact that I did not belong to any political party, no Italian company found me an interesting candidate for any decent position. The corruption that still dom­inates the Italian state and culture forced me to pack my stuff and say good-bye to the Bel paese. My boss himself had sug­gested that I leave. Since I did not have a political padrino, he told me once, I was nothing but a loser.

Moreover, in Italy I had failed to come to grips with my sexu­ality. I felt that I did not belong there, that Rome was not really “my” place, that I “happened” to be Italian without actually being it. I “happened” to be fluent in a language that denied my desire. As the six authors of Fuori repeatedly state, their sexual­ity has often made them feel like a “pariah.” The feeling of “not belonging” is thus extremely common among gays and lesbians. For that matter, being a gay Italian does not differ from being a gay Italian American.

The long and short of it is that in America I initially felt “liberated,” but later disturbing feelings of isolation began to emerge. Of course, I have always known that I am not American, whatever this means, and that I will never be. What I started noticing after a few months was that people did not have a clear “picture” of who I was. How do I look? What kind of accent do I have?, I could not help but ask myself. This new feeling of “not belonging” was supported both by my being an “alien” and by my gayness. Moreover, I did not/do not correspond to the stereotypi­cal image of an Italian/American man. If the image of the self is a “gift” of the Other, I felt that, although I knew that I was Italian, the Other constantly attempted to make me question my identity.

In gay bars, for instance, people bet I was from Poland, or from Germany, or from some Arabic country. Once, in a gay bar in Chicago, a guy approached me and told me that he liked me, because it was clear to him that I was not from here. “Where do you think I come from?”, I asked. “You are too easygoing. You must come from Michigan,” my new friend replied. Without revealing that probably my easygoingness was a result of two or three Long Islands, I complimented him for his perspicacity.

Conversely, when I make an occasional trip to Italy, my friends constantly remark that “I have changed,” that “I look different.” More than one person has told me that I speak Italian with an accent. Last year, I was in Florence with my mother for a few days, and one morning, the owner of the pensione asked my mother where I came from. “We come from Rome,” she confessed, by that meaning “we are from the South.” “No, no, I don’t mean that. Where does your son come from?”, the owner insisted. When my mother told him that at the moment I was living in the States, the guy was relieved. That was it; that was the accent he heard in my Italian.

The list of amusing encounters and events could go on forever. I will limit myself to one highly symbolic story. I have published extensively both in English and in Italian. Last year, I sent a paper in Italian to a prestigious journal, which had already pub­lished an earlier paper of mine in English. Praising the content of my piece, the editor suggested that I translate the text into English, because there were some “imperfections” in my Italian. Having accepted an earlier English text of mine for publication, this professor must have thought that I was an American of Ital­ian descent. For him, my Italian could not be perfect. Once I trans­lated the article in English, it was immediately published.

Although I could dismiss the above incidents/stories as mere projections of someone “who finds in me what s/he is looking for,” I think that these encounters reveal how one’s identity is con­stantly questioned, interpreted, and attacked. The relationship between the subject and the Other “occurs” in a doubt, in a sort of middle ground where image(s) of the self are negotiated and defended.

For the longest time I felt scrutinized, observed, judged. My identity, the position of my body in the world, as Merleau-Ponty would say, did not depend on me. I realized that I was not in con­trol of the image of my self. Both my being from “elsewhere” and my being a gay Italian were sources of uneasiness. When I spoke English, I never “saw” what my voice was actually conveying to my interlocutor. When I walked in a public place, I asked myself whether my movements “betrayed” something or not. I tried to make sense both of my body and of my being.

In recent years I have attempted to get rid of both my image of a gay man who must be “proud” of his sexual orientation and my feeling “different,” “from somewhere else.” I have been trying to believe that a consciousness of our “exposedness” to the world is our only freedom. As I have pointed out, the Other relates to us in a doubt. I am aware of the fact that my “face” is hidden to me, although it is exposed to the world and to the Other. However, the Other, i.e., the awareness of my being exposed, constantly fails to reveal my face once and for all. My face is both exposed and hidden. My body is present in the world and cannot help but interact with it. Both the world and the self/body articulate a language of signs made of distinct signifiers, and yet of infinite and thus “impossible” signifieds. “I am Italian”; “I am a gay Italian American”; “I am a Sicilian American” definitely refer to something. But what is their actual referent?

However, the awareness of being a blind speaker, a body/face that cannot see itself, a voice that never actually hears what it says, both nullifies the concept of the subject as essence, as entity above/beyond life/events, and allows the body to “move through” the language of the world. Ethnicity, languages, memo­ries, are the phonemes of our/the world. They belong to us. “Looking at” our identity/ethnicity/sexuality is a way of partic­ipating in our world of signs. All in all, this is what we are. Rather than judging us, the world invites us to speak its idiom. We, our bodies, are the blind freedom of the world.

 

Armando Maggi

Purdue University

Works Cited

Bell, David, and Gill Valentine. “The Sexed Self.” Mapping the Subject. Ed.Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift. New York: Rout­ledge, 1995. 143–57.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

Lévinas, Emmanuel. Autrement qu’être ou au-dela de l’essence. La Haye: Martin Njihoff, 1974.

Monette, Paul. West of Yesterday, East of Summer. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1995.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Gosh, Boy George, You Must Be Aw­fully Secure in Your Masculinity.” Constructing Masculinity. Ed. Maurice Berger. New York: Routledge, 1995. 11–20.

Tamburri, Anthony Julian, ed. Fuori. Essays by Italian/American Lesbians and Gays. Introd. Mary Jo Bona. West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera, 1996.

Tseelon, E. “Is the Presented Self Sincere? Goffman, Impression Management and The Postmodern Self.” Theory, Culture and Society. 9 (1992): 115–28.

Walkerdine, Valerie. “Subject to Change Without Notice.” Mapping the Subject. Ed. Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift. New York: Routledge, 1995. 309–31.