Queer Bodies and the Death Drive: gender and Sexuality in Italian Giallo

In the tradition of Mikel J. Koven's 2006 monograph, La Dolce Morte, this chapter examines Italian giallo as a vernacular cinema and situates the film type in its sociohistorical context. It interrogates cult cinema studies' Anglo-American appropriation of the vernacular in giallo, problematizing a body of masculinist scholarship that, emerging in the early 1990s, claims to reappropriate giallo's representations of gender and sexuality. Giallo's fetishistic preoccupation with identities that defy heteronormative standards of gender and sexuality can be contextualized by the fact that, during the 1960s and 1970s, Italian visual culture started to develop its fields of representation, opening new spaces for the visibility of marginalized bodies and oppressed subjectivities.