Queering the South : Case Studies with Emma Dante

This monograph analyses the films and plays of Sicilian director Emma Dante by adopting a queer approach and focusing on haunting, kinship, and Southern cultural bodies. Tracing the connections that Dante’s works establish with a larger Southern cultural genealogy, this monograph argues that queerness is at the core of a Southern epistemology.

This book offers a queer reading of the oeuvre of Sicilian director Emma Dante, winner of the 2026 Theatre Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. It contextualises Dante’s work within the longstanding anti-meridionalist North–South binary that has dogged Italy history and culture, and argues that Dante exemplifies a Southern and queer epistemology that unsettles this divide and revalorises the South. The book examines this alternative understanding of the South in Dante’s work, focusing in turn on the poetics of human and nonhuman kinship, oddkin, and queer families; haunting and temporality; and Southern cultural bodies (the Opera dei Pupi and the femminelle). Throughout, it situates Dante’s production within a broader genealogy of cultural texts and practices that are also both queer and Southern, drawing connections with works by artists such as Letizia Battaglia, Liliana Cavani, Jolanda Insana, Curzio Malaparte, Fabio Mollo, Elsa Morante, and Ferzan Özpetek. Working on and with Emma Dante – on her oeuvre and the expansive cultural network it generates – the book ultimately argues that queerness, far from being the marginal ‘other’ of the Italian South, is situated at the core of its cultural, theoretical, and epistemological articulation.