The Department of Italian Studies at UC Berkeley proudly presents:

The 2024 Marie G. Ringrose Graduate Lecture in Italian Studies by Professor Ara H. Merjian from New York University

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Pier Paolo Pasolini emerged as a lightning rod for postwar gay and lesbian culture well before his controversial murder in 1975. American artists in particular have long since gravitated toward both his work and his person: the visual artists Felix Gonzales-Torres and David Wojnarowicz; authors Kathy Acker and Gary Indiana; filmmakers Barbara Hammer and Cathy Lee Crane; and prominent cultural luminaries from Robert Mapplethorpe to Leo Bersani to John Waters. Such names do not even comprise the myriad individuals – from poets to playwrights to pornography editors – who have made of Pasolini a queer martyr of almost hagiographic status.

Pasolini himself eschewed the politics of identity, however. Writing in the Fall of 1966, after a maiden visit to New York, he averred: “I cannot accept anything of the world in which I live, neither the apparatuses of state centralism…nor its cultured minorities.” Even in its minoritarian and marginalized status, then, Pasolini’s desire skirted the precincts of “culture” as such – particularly to the extent that it might intersect with rampant neocapitalist consumerism.

This talk examines Pasolini’s fraught place in America’s queer culture since the 1960s, especially as framed by the gay and lesbian liberation movements of the 1970s and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ‘90s. Looking at visual and textual material, it explores the tensions between Pasolini’s theoretical consequences for queer art and letters, and his personal and political crusade against what he called “false tolerance” and “anarchical sexuality.”

Generously cosponsored by: