My doctoral project aims to investigate the representations and the meanings of female-female desire in early modern Italian literature, analysing many textual forms and genres (cantari, comedies, pastoral dramas, etc.).
My research aspires to fill the present gaps, create the first, vast survey of female-female desire in early modern Italian literature and give an interpretation of the collected data coherent with their socio-cultural context.
My work has three main objectives: 1) to demonstrate the existence of a variety of forms of female-female desire in Italian early modern period; 2) to examine their modes of representations and their meanings in Renaissance literary imagery; 3) to investigate the narrative, linguistic and stylistic strategies adopted by Italian writers (especially women) to express – more or less explicitly – some peculiar values and/or transgressive tendencies.