Gay, Feminist, And Arberesh: Marginal Italian Identities in the Fiction of Aldo Busi, Rossana Campo, And Carmine Abate‪.‬

Preamble In the last 20-30 years, Italy has experienced significant alterations to a modus cogitandi about what it means to be Italian that had remained, at least among the intellectual elite, fairly stable for a long time, despite centuries of fractional and fractured existence of its political, ethnic and social body. While exclusionary identity constructs have not been solely "Italian," (1) in Italy they persisted longer or were not challenged as thoroughly as in other Western countries. Nevertheless, borderline identities that differ from centralized normative standards have existed for centuries in the Italian peninsula, simmering beneath surface essentialisms. Recently they have attracted the interest of academics and politicians, as discourses pertaining to their existence have gained a privileged status in the cultural sphere.