Weaving Textual Tapestries: weaving the Italian womanwriter into the social fabric across genres, bo

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Weaving Textual Tapestries weaving the
Italian woman-writer into the social fabric
across genres, borders and divides

• Dr Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli
• School of Health and Social Development
• Deakin University
• mariapc_at_deakin.edu.au

Weaving Textual Tapestries Weaving the Italian
Woman-Writer into the Social Fabric in Susanna
Scarparo Rita Wilson (eds) (2004) Across
Genres, Generations and Borders Italian Women
Writing Lives Newark University of Delaware
Press.
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• Aldo Busi (1988) I write, in short, to give
  sense to the lives of others.
• Annie Proulx (2005). Lots of scraps from lots of
  cupboards make up a story.
• Adrienne Rich (1979). The pattern of the carpet
  is a surface. When we look closely, or when we
  become weavers, we learn of the tine multiple
  threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots
  on the underside of the carpet.
• Makita (1995). the truth that everyone knows
  about, but no ones talking about.
• Diane Arbus Nothing is ever the same as they
  said it was. Its what Ive never seen before
  that I recognise.

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We don't see things as they are,we see them as
we are. Anais Nin
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Learning to interrogate our own multiple
social locations and those of others
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The Triple A Borderdweller

• I will explore my experiences as an
  academic/author/activist endeavouring to
• interweave theory, research and narrative
• interweave divergent and convergent
  constructions and constraints regarding cultural
  diversity, sexual diversity and gender diversity
  from
• the Italian (migrant and Australian-born)
  communities
• the predominantly Anglo-Australian GLBTIQ
  communities
• the academic communities and their
  heteropatriarchal hierarchies regarding where my
  research and narratives belong and how it should
  be published
• and the wider heteronormative Australian society.

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Dealing With Heteronormativity, Sexism,
Classism and Racism From All Directions

• The heteronormative late 80s, research into
  second-generation Italian-Australian women
  Where am I in your research? said Italian
  lesbian friends?
• Anglo-Australian feminist academics in the early
  1990s do Italian lesbians dont exist? Where
  and how will you find them? Will they talk to
  you? ( the work of Mirna Cicioni in opening up
  feminist spaces for queer feminist Italian
  research)
• Italian community (male, educated) gatekeepers at
  Italian-Australian conferences in the mid-1990s
  Italian gay men dont exist, Italian men
  wouldnt be gay ma figlia mia.
• Italian community (mainly religious and
  heteropatriarchal elements) che schivo, you
  should be ashamed of your daughter they said to
  my parents.

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• Anglo-Australian decisionmakers in education and
  publishing with racist and sexist views of
  Italian women weve published our migrant story
  for the year this cant be a real Italian
  family because
• Professional colleagues is this kind of
  research and publishing a good career move?,
  your books wont sell, decide what youre
  going to be an academic or an author or work
  with communities Today Tonight loved it!
• The establishment of the Italian-Australian
  Institute and as a panel member getting GLBTIQ
  issues on the agenda, into the conference in 2000
  on the last day in the last session, and it
  became the most popular and overcrowded session
  was it about seeing the freaks? But at least,
  the freaks talked back! (Gamson, 1998)
• (Vic Perri, Vicki Guglielmo, Luciano Di
  Gregorio)
• Those who send the hate mail you shouldve
  been drowned at birth, were praying for your
  death, your book caused my sons suicide
• Those who scratched my car cos of my rainbow
  sticker faggot lover
• Those who harassed my daughter in primary school
  youre a lezzo, your mothers hangs out with
  freaks.

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Border-dwelling!

• negotiate the tensions and put to good use the
  borderzone between my heterocentric privileged
  self and my feminist ethnic wog-chick self
• wearing a frock and a wedding ringstrategically
  using my partnering and parenting cues to gain
  access, get past gatekeepers, open dialogue,
  create spaces that recruit and promote.
• let them know I actually do have a blatantly
  obvious agenda and aim to recruit to affirm,
  support and encourage the health and well being
  of a culturally diverse, gender diverse and
  sexually diverse society.

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• Discourses of recruitment and having an
  agenda are less likely to be used to silence me
• as if I am detached or sanitised from
  having a responsibility and accountability that
  comes with heteroprivilege and other forms of
  privlege to do something about the
  discrimiantions and injustices that privilege
  constructs.
• as if GLBTIQ and other minority people are
  removed from me, only research objects rather
  than family, friends and community members.

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The Questions and Cautions That Go With Me

• How to collaborate and not appropriate
• Refusing to own the research and the issues,
  instead being a catalyst to further research,
  activism and those who come after me and who will
  do it all much better than me.

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Some metaphors for the Triple A borderdweller

• The warp and the weft the writer as weaver
• Identities and community allegiances are not
  fixed and dichotomous, but rather fluid,
  transitory, fragmented, episodic. Because my life
  has been lived within, beyond, and underneath the
  simplistic surface of the carpets of Italian
  and woman, I want to explore other lives lived
  within, beyond and underneath the surfaces of
  many carpets. I want to pick at the multiple
  layers, threads, knots and tangles. I want to
  suture together supposedly conflicting and
  oppositional colours and textures.
• In order to effectively convey this interweaving
  of lived experiences, I construct textual
  tapestries. My tools as a textual weaver include
  theory, research and narrative, each informing
  and augmenting the other. I am
• the theorist and the storyteller
• the researcher and the researched,
• the narrator of my own autobiography and the
  biographies of family, friends and young people
  who have participated in my research-weaving,
• the novelist creating fiction in order to present
  truths without harming the participants in my
  research

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Which Language Does a Writer-Weaver Use?

• When I was five in 1965, I was thrown into a
  monocultural Australian working class urban
  school and drowned/cleansed in English.
• Much later, I was told in order to have some
  measure of credibility in academia, (my so-called
  "wog-chick look" was already problematic) I would
  have to learn academic language.
• I now bridge and border the three- dialect
  Italian, working class wog-English,
  academic-speak- sometimes comfortably, but they
  each only convey a part of the multiple. As a
  weaver-researcher-writer, my challenge is to
  interweave the words, the ways of communicating,
  and their worlds.

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The Anecdote is the Explanation Being the
Storyteller and the Ethnographer

• I come from a Southern Italian peasant family
  oral storytelling tradition as a way of teaching
  and discussing political and sensitive issues. In
  this tradition, the anecdote is the explanation.
• Indeed, this position is supported by
  ethnographic research methodology. Many
  ethnographers argue that there is no such thing
  as simple description or simple storying. Both
  the storyteller and the ethnographer must make
  decisions about what is important, guided by an
  analytical process based on implicit and explicit
  concepts, assumptions and theories

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Accessiblity and Passionate Sociology (Game
Metcalfe)

• Academic Texts on the Kitchen Table
• My Italian childhood has also made the issue
  of accessibility central to my work. I try to
  move beyond the dry and impoverished language of
  traditional academic writing as that writing is
  alien to the Italian migrant working class worlds
  I come from. I also want my research participants
  to be able to read themselves, find themselves,
  represent themselves in my work
• Do we really have to avoid lyrical
  description, subjectivity, and the personal voice
  in order to hold our place in the line-up of
  respected social scientists?
  
• (Altork).

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The Written-About Can Write and Read

• How do I write so that the "written-about" can
  access the work, identify themselves, and
  collaborate with me in the portrayals of their
  realities? If I write about my mother migrating
  to Australia, or a Lebanese friend's bisexual
  Muslim realities, will they be able to see the
  journeys they make through my words even if they
  haven't stepped into a university, apart from
  cleaning its toilets and cooking in its
  cafeterias?
• I want to work with my research participants to
  reconstruct their lives and knowledge into a text
  within which they are still able to see
  themselves. How do I reconstruct people's
  intimate details in ways that do not exploit nor
  appropriate?
• Text as metissage this is the weaving of
  different strands of raw material and threads of
  various colours into one piece of fabric which
  free the mestizaje researcher-writer to
  enlarge, redefine, or explode the canons of our
  discursive practices(Lionnet). The texts I
  produce are an interweaving of diverse textual
  threads autobiography, fiction, narrative,
  participant observation, interview transcript,
  photography, cartoons, art. It is a deliberate
  patterning to textually represent the major
  themes of hybridity and metissage, the dynamic
  and powerful interplay of confluence and
  difference, a polyphony of voices as well as the
  polyphonic in one voice.

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Walking the multiple-within the writer as tour
guide

• I become a tour guide, taking the reader on a
  walk or journey into the world of metissage
  where many worlds and boundaries, assumptions and
  stereotypes, are revealed, problematised,
  negotiated and traversed.
• I invite the reader to walk the borders where two
  or more worlds meet and mesh, worlds that are
  supposedly non-existent, opposed or unaware of
  each other due to the prolifieration of divisive
  myths, strategies of silencing, and ignorant
  stereotypes

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Weaving a tapestry of social diversity
multiculturalism as surface

• Multiculturalism, as officially espoused and as
  taken up by many ethnic community
  leaders/gatekeepers in Australia, is not enough.
• 1. the focus on cultural heritage and the
  maintenance of cultural tradition has been used
  to hide, ignore and perpetuate the injustices,
  hierarchies and prejudices inherent within those
  traditions.
• 2. the focus on establishing and developing
  ones own culture, producing cultural narratives
  and texts for ourselves, may be perpetuating
  insularity and apathy in regard to the
  responsibility each community has to engage
  politically and socially in the issues facing
  Australia and the world. The descent into "ethnic
  chauvinism" often parallels Anglo-chauvinism.
• 3. the whole notion of authenticity, of the
  authentic migrant experience, is one that comes
  to us constructed by hegemonic gatekeeper voices
  and so, what one has to tease out is what is not
  there , who is not represented the internal
  divisions and hierarchies community is not
  always home.

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• We cannot hold hypocritical and bigoted views,
  using the rhetoric of multiculturalism to bolster
  the ambitions of our community gatekeepers, and
  protect them from external criticism, while
  others in our community are stifled and
  marginalised.
• We are not meant to use multiculturalism as a
  shield to deflect internal criticism and
  interrogation.
• We are not meant to use constructions of cultural
  heritage, tradition and insularity inherent in a
  fixed and fossilizing concept of multiculturalism
  to ignore our responsibilities and accountability
  to social injustices happening in the wider
  Australian and international setting, as well as
  those within our community.

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Tomorrows tapestries the writer as travel
agent

• When approached by publishers to do Girls
  Talk and Boys Stuff, who I was and the absence of
  girls like me from the books I had read as an
  Italian girl and young(er) woman, directly
  influenced the metissage content and tapestry
  style of the book.
• This would not be a book for and by
  Anglo-Australian girls with the obligatory, token
  ethnic girls or lesbian girls or others
  chapter at the end of the book. Girls Talk had
  to be inclusive, multiple, diverse, with a
  polyphony of voices. Sexual diversity, a
  diversity of abilities and ways of constructing
  text around themes, not identity categories, was
  important.
• With When Our Children Come Out, I wanted
  to get beyond the constructions of wounded and
  victimised GLBTIQ young people and teachers
  feeling unable to address homophobia in schools,
  to show agency, action, resistance and
  subversion.

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Being a Travel Agent to a Future I Cannot Travel
To

• At some point in the future, what I am saying
  today will no longer be important or necessary.
  Indeed, it will appear flawed and simplistic, and
  if the critic is generous, it will at least be
  set aside with comforting labels such as
  pioneering, significant in its day, paving
  the way for the better work that followed. For
  isnt that the measure of our success?
• As social activists, we are working toward a
  point where we will not be needed anymore, where
  our stories will have been told and retold and
  have become part of the fabric of history. Where
  the issues we consider contentious and struggle
  for social justice with today will have been
  resolved or will require a new generation to take
  up the challenges in ways that are far more
  applicable to their context. At that point, I
  hope to be able to bow out gracefully or to keep
  supporting those who come after me.
• Thus, one of my greatest joys in the research,
  teaching and writing that I do is the opportunity
  to empower, to open rusty gates, act as a mentor
  and catalyst to those who will come after me.

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The Future an Example of Multiplicity,
Intermixture, Inclusion and Justice
http//www.agmc.org.au/

• Living and Loving in Diversity
• The Australian Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,
  Transgender, Intersex Queer Multicultural
  Council
• Jewish
• Muslim
• Italian
• Greek
• Diverse Asian

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