Eccentric Subjects: Absence and Education in Queer Italian Graphic Novels and Comics

The lecture will explore contemporary Italian LGBTQIA+ graphic novels and comics, their current success, and the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that they embody. It will then focus on the case study of Percy Bertolini, a queer and trans artist, and their production of counter-educational fanzines and comics. In particular, it will examine the self-published Bambinə Matte series (Crazy Children, 2023-2026), and the trilogy Scuola di Butch: L’inizio della rivoluzione (Butch School: The Beginning of the Revolution, 2024), Scuola di Butch: Un autobus che va dal centro al margine (Butch School: A Bus That Goes from the Centre to the Margins, 2024), and Scuola di Butch: Più vicine (Butch School: Closer, 2024), published by Eris Edizioni. In the Bambinə Matte fanzines, Bertolini and other queer Italian artists explore their queer childhoods, the constraints imposed by traditional educational environments, and the ways they resisted institutional violence while constructing their own identities and dismantling the norms imposed upon them. Similarly, the Scuola di Butch series ironically and provocatively depicts the transformation of a police academy into a “butch school,” where young girls and children learn about topics such as Modern Lesbianism, Butch Art, and Transfeminist Music, among others, and read key queer and transfeminist texts, including works by Judith Butler and Monique Wittig. First, the lecture will explore Bertolini’s counter-hegemonic schools, contextualising them in the present Italian socio-cultural context. Then, it will examine recurring images of emptiness and darkness in both series and interpret them through the lens of antisocial queer theory (Bernini 2017; Edelman 2022).

Alice Parrinello is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Italian Studies at the University of Toronto. She completed her PhD/DPhil at the University of Oxford. Her project looked at the films and plays by Sicilian director Emma Dante and formulated a queer Southern epistemology. Her first monograph, Queering the South: Case Studies with Emma Dante, is forthcoming with Peter Lang.