Rethinking Identities Across Boundaries: Genders/Genres/Genera

This collection of essays aims to widen the current critique on borders by examining their entanglements with constructions of identity and disciplinary categories. In particular, it calls into question established models of gender, notions of narrative genres and typological genera of borders in today’s literary, artistic, philosophical, and socio-political discourse. The chapters interrogate boundaries and boundary-crossing not only in terms of geographical frontiers and the physical acts of trespassing, but also as discursive constructs that police crossing subjects as gendered subjects, on the one hand, and identify artistic genres and academic disciplines as fixed, sealed-in ways of understanding the world, on the other. Taking inspiration from the multiple meanings of the Italian word genere (which stands for “gender”, “genre”, and “typology”/“genus” simultaneously), the volume reflects on the gendered, narrative, and typological nature of borders and border imagery, and on the significance and potentialities of crossover phenomena taking place in borderlands, in the fields of arts, literature, anthropology, sociology and philosophy.

Table of Contents:
 1 Bordering Genders, Genres, Genera: An Introduction Claudia Capancioni, Mariaconcetta Costantini, and Mara Mattoscio.- 2 Biometric Technologies, Gendered Subjectivities, and Artistic Resistance C.L. Quinan.- 3 ‘My tongue doesn’t believe in boundaries’: A®tivism Across the US/Mexico Border Lorena Carbonara and Dora Renna.- 4 Migrant Women’s Documentary Filmmaking: Shifting Positionalities and Precarious Creativity in the Experience of Five Latin American Directors Dalila Missero.- 5 ‘I’ve always thought that we are living on the cowhide’: Chen Li’s Edge as Method and Border-Queering in The Edge of the Island Li-hsin Hsu.- 6 Crossing the Borders of Genders and Genres: Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater as a World-Making Narrative of Identity Reaffirmation Alessandra Di Pietro.- 7 Mobility, Belonging and the Utopia of a Borderless World: A Spatial and Identitarian Reading of Imbolo Mbue’s Behold theDreamers Mariaconcetta Costantini.- 8 ‘Violent Conclusions’ versus ‘Hopeful Returns’: Zadie Smith’s The Embassy of Cambodia and the Performative Border-Crossing of the Narrative Voice Mara Mattoscio.- 9 Morphing Forms: Metamorphosis in Twenty-First Century British Women’s Experimental Short Fiction Helen Cousins.- 10 ‘This particular art [is] all about walls’: Nomadic Poetics of Identity in Ali Smith’s How to be both Claudia Capancioni.- 11 Oblique Emotions and Border Intimacies in Dionne Brand’s Theory Libe García Zarranz 12 An Unresolved Crossing: David Foster Wallace’s ‘Oblivion’ Adriano Ardovino and Pia Masiero.- 13 Crossing Gender: Andy Warhol’s Candy Darling, America and Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve Marie Mulvey-Roberts.- 14 Genders, GYnealogies, GYne(co)alogies of Decolonial Geo-thalasso-corpographies: A Theoretical Reflection on Interconnectedness in Gender Configurations Paola Zaccaria.- 15 Spivak and Sontag: Deconstructing Borders Through a Philosophical Appraisal of Literature Chiara Scarlato.

About the Author :
Claudia Capancioni is Reader in English Literature at Bishop Grosseteste University, UK. She specialises in Victorian and contemporary women writers, life and travel writing, and gender studies. Mariaconcetta Costantini is Full Professor of English Literature at G. d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy. She specialises in Victorian and contemporary literature, especially in popular fiction, women writers, and the Gothic. Mara Mattoscio teaches English Literature and Culture at the University of Macerata, Italy. She specialises in Anglophone postcolonial literature and film, race and gender studies, and critical theory.