Queer Gender Performativity in Documentary Cinema: The Transgender Look of Italian Filmmaker Simone Cangelosi

Adelina Sánchez Espinosa,Orianna Calderón Sandoval

doi:10.5209/cgen.67500

Abstract

This article analyses the ways in which Italian filmmaker Simone Cangelosi enacts a queer countervisuality in his documentary films Dalla testa ai piedi (2007) and Una nobile rivoluzione (2014). The theoretical framework traces a genealogy from what has been termed as fe/male gazes up to what can be understood as transgender, queer and feminist gazes. Connections between the performative mode of representation, performative documentary cinema and gender performativity are also established. By means of a close reading of both films and an interview with the filmmaker, this paper argues that queer ways of seeing in documentary cinema cannot only depict existing realities but also put forward other ways of being, becoming and collectively enacting the right to appear.

Highlights

This article analyses the ways in which Italian filmmaker Simone Cangelosi enacts a queer countervisuality in his documentary films Dalla testa ai piedi (2007) and Una nobile rivoluzione (2014)
The performative potential that documentary has to cocreate the realities it shows, makes it possible for it to operate as countervisuality in two levels: depicting existing realities and putting forward other ways of seeing, being and becoming.6. This theoretical framework is used to identify practices of queer countervisuality in two documentaries directed by Italian filmmaker Simone Cangelosi: Dalla testa ai piedi (From Head to Foot, 2007) and Una nobile rivoluzione (A Noble Revolution, 2014)
Simone Cangelosi was born in Pisa in 1968

Summary

Gender performativity and performative documentary

Performativity is understood in three senses, following Bill Nichols (2010), Stella Bruzzi. Eccentricity is punished rather than celebrated and usually encounters harassment, pathologisation, precarity, and violence. This is where the political dimension of gender performativity theory becomes evident. This theoretical framework is used to identify practices of queer countervisuality in two documentaries directed by Italian filmmaker Simone Cangelosi: Dalla testa ai piedi (From Head to Foot, 2007) and Una nobile rivoluzione (A Noble Revolution, 2014). Both depart from the realist documentary conventions, resorting instead to reflexive and performative modes of representation. The method employed for the analysis is close-reading as reappropriated by contemporary feminist methodologies: a bridge between formalist and poststructuralist approaches, starting from the text, but recognising “the contextuality and historicity of any reading” (Lukic and Sánchez 2011: 106)

Dalla testa ai piedi: a filmic self-construction process

Una nobile rivoluzione: a personal-political portrait of an LGBT activist

16 Original fragment: “dentro il film così come ci eravamo noi nel presente”

Final thoughts: queer countervisuality in documentary cinema