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Valentina PagliaiLinguistic Anthropology
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For a list of my conference papers click here 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.
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Remarque Institute UCLA Department of Anthropology Oberlin College |
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