Italian Masculinity As Queer Melodrama ─ Caravaggio, Puccini, Contemporary Cinema

This study argues that the melodramatic sensibility has played a crucial role in the historical construction of Italian masculinity and sexuality. Frequently reliant on a melodramatic mode, Italian male self-representations are "queer," deconstructing binaries of masculine and feminine, active and passive, homosexual and heterosexual. While historically deployed for contradictory political ends such as fascism and its critique, this deconstruction can today inform anti-homophobic inquiry. Reading the melodramatic sensibility across three different periods in Italian history and three different media, this book argues that, given the tendency to locate the origins of melodrama in the French Revolution, an analysis of Italy's contribution to the development of the melodramatic sensibility - particularly via the Baroque - has been neglected. Exploring the affective needs to which melodrama responds, this book is a contribution to the growing archive of work on affect, its history, and historicity, and the role, significance, and meaning of affect in everyday life.

John Champagne is Professor of English at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College, USA. Champagne is the author of four other books, most recently, Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy. His essays have appeared in such journals as The Italianist, Modern Italy, College English, The Journal of Homosexuality, Cinema Journal, and boundary 2.