Cinema Studies Professor Sergio Rigoletto was recently interviewed by Ellen Nerenberg for the New Books Network podcast on his recently published volume. 

What does it mean to “upend a norm?”

This is the translation of the title of Prof. Rigoletto’s recent study “Upended norms: essays on gender and sexuality in Italian cinema and television.” Prof. Rigoletto focuses on Italian audiovisual texts from the mid-20th century until today, asking questions about how these media helped mark the boundaries of social norms in Italy as well as chart the threats to those boundaries made by sexually active women, foreigners, drag queens, homosexuals and other queer subjects. How these threats move from the background (Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, 1960) to centerstage, in films like Ferzan Ozpetek’s The Ignorant Fairies (2001) and Luca Guadagnino’s Call me by Your Name (2017). What do these movements tell us about gendered subjects in Italian mainstream and popular media? What do they reveal about norms? 

Listen to the Podcast

Le norme traviate investigates the persistent significance and changing meaning of sexual normativity in Italian cinema and television, exploring its operating logic from the years of the economic miracle to the present day. How does heterosexuality present itself to audiences as both an ideal and a norm? What genre conventions, narrative tropes and forms of spectatorial engagement have been historically deployed with the two-fold goal of naturalizing heterosexuality and preserving a seemingly inclusive national imaginary? What sexualized exclusions and racialized ghosts have threatened the stability of this imaginary? 

In answering these questions, the book explores some of the expanding territories of desire, intimacy and socialization being opened up by post-liberation gay culture. While appraising the significance of recent films such as Call Me by Your Name as evidence of a new era of liberal benevolence and acceptance of LGBTQ experiences, Le norme traviate investigates the emergence of new ethno-nationalistic configurations of sexual normativity and neoliberal homo-normalization in contemporary cinema and television.

Sergio Rigoletto has a joint appointment in the departments of Cinema Studies and Romance Languages. His research explores the relation between social change and media aesthetics (especially cinema and TV). He has written extensively on queer cinemas, film stardom & performance, international television, film costume, and many aspects of Italian cinema. He is the author of two monographs: Masculinity and Italian Cinema: Sexual Politics, Social Conflict and Male Crisis in the 1970s (Edinburgh University Press: 2014); and Le norme traviate: Saggi sul genere e sulla sessualita nel cinema e nella televisione italiana (Meltemi: 2020).

He has co-edited a book entitled Popular Italian Cinema (Palgrave: 2013) and is currently working on two book projects: a monograph on actress Anna Magnani and a volume provisionally titled Queer from the South: Film Video Art and Media Activism in the Mediterranean.