Road Movies and Gas Stations: Monica Stambrini's <i>Benzina</i> as Creation of Alternative Spaces

Abstract

Both the novel and the film Benzina think of the literary and the visual as contesting sites for women. In revisiting the fields of space within a capitalist society and the struggle for representation of sexual identity, these two works successfully deploy strategies where the visual narrative — literary and cinematic — confirms its ability to be a place in which subjects try out distinct possibilities of their existential corporeality. Rather than presenting crystallized subjectivities, these works analyze the attempts a lesbian couple makes at finding their place within a social system still fraught by stereotypization of gender roles. This article examines how Benzina's cinematic adaptation convincingly extricates representations of the protagonists' struggle in Italian society. The idea of a feminist geometry, a triangle whose theorem is of a problematic nature, at once social and personal of arduous solution was prompted by my memory of American painter Ed Ruscha's diagonal compositions entitled Gas Stations.