Calabretta-Sajder to Deliver Invited Lecture Thursday

University of Arkansas

Ryan Calabretta-Sajder, assistant professor of Italian, will give an invited lecture at the Rochester Institute of Technology. 

His lecture, titled "Gendering the Body Politic in Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Cinematic Scope," takes place at 4 p.m.,Thursday, April 22.

The event is open to the public but registation is required. To register click here: t.ly/30k4​.

The lecture is co-sponsored with Marist College, Casa Italiana of Nazareth College of Rochester and SUNY Farmingdale State College. 

Abstract: Pier Paolo Pasolini, best known to U.S. audiences as a director, even though he excelled in numerous genres, was a leading film maker in the 1960s and 1970s on the European screen. As an auteur, Pasolini challenged Italian, and for that matter European, cinema, both thematically and cinematographically, even to his own detriment within the Italian landscape. Some of his most "scandalous" films are those most studied and still debated in film studies, and Pasolini is a name known across fields due to the influence he had upon European cultural society. In fact, at Pasolini's 1975 funeral, Alberto Moravia called Pasolini a civic poet, which is clearly present through his filmography.  

In this contribution, I explore various uses of the conceptualization of "queer" as present in Pasolini's films. I will begin by examining how Pasolini queers time and place through adopting Elizabeth Freeman (Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories) and Jack Halberstam's (In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives) theoretical frameworks and applying them to films like Mamma Roma (particularly looking at the wedding and prostitution scenes) as well as numerous moments in Teorema. In queering time and space, I contend that Pasolini attempts to "normalize" the subaltern.

Additionally, I intend to analyze how Pasolini presents the body and offer an in-depth examination on the body politics present in a few of his films (for example Accattone and Teorema). In addition to utilizing Butler's Bodies that Matter, Gayle Salamon's Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality, and Hector Dominguez-Ruvalcaba's Translating the Queer: Body Politics and Transnational Conversations, I will also include gaze theory to argue that Pasolini queers the body as a means to a politic end. And by doing this, Pasolini visually demonstrates his "civic poetic" voice.

Biography: Calabretta-Sajder is the Italian section head at the U of A, where he teaches courses in Italian, Film and Gender Studies.  He is the author of Divergenze in celluloide: colore, migrazione e identità sessuale nei film gay di Ferzan Özpetek (Celluloid Divergences: Color, Migration, and Sexual Identity in the Gay Series of Ferzan Özpetek) with Mimesis editore and editor of Pasolini's Lasting Impressions: Death, Eros, and Literary Enterprise in the Opus of Pier Paolo Pasolini with Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. His research interests include the integration of gender, class and migration in both Italian and Italian American literature and cinema. He has recently been awarded one of four Fulbright Awards for the Foundation of the South to conduct research and teach at the University of Calabria, Arcavacata, for the spring of 2017. He is currently working on two authored, book-length projects, one exploring the Italian American gay author Robert Ferro who died of AIDS complications in 1988 and the second on the Algerian Italian author Amara Lakhous.

Calabretta-Sajder is currently president of the American Association of Teachers of Italian, the president of Gamma Kappa Alpha, the National Italian Honors Society, the co-chair for the Committee of Graduate Students in the Profession for the Modern Language Association, an Executive Committee member of the Italian American Studies Association, and secretary/treasurer of the American Association of University Supervisors and Coordinators. In May 2015 he received a research grant from the South Central MLA Association to conduct archival research on Italian American authors at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Calabretta-Sajder has received numerous teaching grants to adopt diverse technological tools into the world language teaching classroom.