Individuals with no biographies. A journey through Italian trans cinema

Since the 1950s the emergence of a trans wave in Italian cinema consisted in a gradual elaboration of peculiar discursive strategies, that is thematic recurrences and specific stylistic features that have flourished in the space where the game of every trans story is played: the representation of the body. A body which is at the same time individual, social, and symbolic. The attempts to conceptualize the experiences of trans people always produced an “ontological crisis that is experienced both in sexuality and in language” (Butler, 1999, p. XI), challenging all together the heteronormative logos, binarism, reproductive obsession and familistic mythology on which Italian bourgeois culture is based. This essay (re)constructs the history of Italian trans cinema by combining historical coordinates and film analysis, rediscovering forgotten or deleted movies, experiences and authors, and focusing on the movies where gender identity is represented as a space of intersection, experimentation, dispersion.