L&GEND international Research Group

Through the study of the human sciences, and particularly of literature and other artistic forms, the L&GEND Research Group intends to study the origins, historical evolutions, current dynamics and potentialities of individual and collective gender identities, expressed in various cultural systems and in processes of exchange/conflict within these. The research carried out by the Group is grounded on a renewed public interest, both in Italy and in the world, in gender identity and its ramifications/conjunctions/connections with crucial themes such as power relations and cultural, linguistic and social minorities; discriminations because of sexual, political and/or religious orientation; development of national identities; narratives of race and ethnicity, and Eurocentric academic thought, still structured on notions of racial, sexual, and economic inequalities. These research goals, which are in line with Goal 5 of the 2030 UN Agenda for sustainable development, are also consistent with the Research Guidelines of the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at “G. d’Annunzio” University, as these latter Guidelines are centred on the study of influences and exchanges among the diverse elements of the literary space, and their cultural, linguistic and multidisciplinary interconnections.

A primary, but not exclusive, aim of the Group is to investigate the ways in which literature, human sciences and (audio)visual languages interrogate and represent cultures, gender identities and their social, cultural and philosophical implications throughout the centuries and across cultures. Such implications, essential to literary discourse, have been investigated with deeper awareness in the literary production of the last three centuries, thanks to the parallel development of theoretical discourses related to the psycho-socio-cultural mechanisms through which the individual perceives their identity and sense of belonging to specific social groups. Inaugurated by (male and female) nineteenth-century thinkers and elaborated by twentieth-century feminist theorization, especially in English, French and Italian contexts, the philosophic discourse on gender identity further evolved at the end of the last century, expanding into new theoretical paths such as gender studies and masculinity studies. By using these tools, the Group intends to analize literary and multidisciplinary responses to questions of perception and representations of the self as a ‘gendered’ subject from modernity to the contemporary age, studying transits and intersections among cultures, artistic languages and different genres, both diachronically and synchronically.

This is a field of great international relevance, to which the Group aims to contribute by examining authors, as well as cultural and artistic contexts, that have been less explored by critics until now. The pluridisciplinarity of the theoretical framework illustrated above is combined with the multimediality of the cultural products under investigation, which include, alongside written and oral literature, other forms of expressions, such as the intersemiotic processes pertaining to literature, cinema and its expansions, theatre, the visual arts, etc.

The Group’s main lines of research include:  the literary representation of gender identity in specific literary  and cultural contexts from antiquity to the present (in particular, in English, French, Italian, Slavonic, Arabic, and Chinese speaking contexts, as well as in Japan and Southern Asia); the exploration and rewriting of the past in order to shape a new multiple identity; the deconstruction of the traditional category of the feminine in popular English literature between the nineteenth century and contemporaneity; the literary representations of identity constructions, gender equality and the woman question in Arab/Muslim, Indian and  southern Slavonic societies; forms of literary hybridization and experimentation produced by the mixing of genres/genders; auto/biographical  writing and travel writing as forms aiming to retrieve  communal stories  and experiences, especially through dynamics of transcultural, transnational and transgenerational encounters and exchanges; the problematic representation of dynamics of desire eluding compulsory heterosexuality, and of gender and transgender performativity; questions of intersectional feminism in Black studies, postcolonial, diaspora and migration writing; the use of literary language to reinforce/eradicate socio-sexual categories and lexical evolution  in relation to gender identities; literary translation as transposition/deconstruction/appropriation of gender models through/in different linguistic-cultural fields; gender in the visual arts; medial and intermedial dynamics in the representation of gender, included gender-bound shifts and the transmission of stereotypes in audiovisual translation.

The L&GEND Group was set up and formally approved by the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures in a meeting held on 27th May 2021.

Since its establishment, the L&GEND Research Group has worked within the collaborative agreements based on the Bilateral Agreement for teaching activity, research, education and training programs with Universities, Institutions and foreign public and private companies, which was originally signed by G. d'Annunzio University and Bishop Grosseteste University of Lincoln (UK) in 2018.