1. GENDER AND SURROUNDINGS. THE FIGURE OF “FEMMINIELLO”
Prof. Paolo Valerio
University of Naples “Federico II”
Unit of Clinical Psychology and Applied Psychoanalysis
Chairperson of ONIG
Chairperson of “Gender, Sex, Culture” Foundation

2. PLURALITY OF IDENTITIES: A CONSEQUENCE OF GLOBALIZATION
Into our post-modern society, where the exchanges between cultures and nations have hugely increased, where the advertising messages have become part of our beliefs modifying them, where there is a stream of news from the web, also the identity of everyone has changed.
In the present, it appears impossible to speak about only one identity, only one kind of male or female, of white and black, etc.
Today we should speak about plurality of identities because the globalization leads up to compare oneself with the Other, with someone different from the Self.

3. IDENTITY: INTERFACE BETWEEN THE SELF AND THE OTHER
The identity starts to develop very early in life through two complementary processes. The very young child emotionally invests the people around him/her and those who take care of him/her. At the same time these people invest emotionally the child, focusing for a long time on his/her care, education, transmission of values, but ...
…many transmitted things are not fully aware because, in the mind of parents and all adults, they have become automatic!

4. The identity, a concept that answers to the questions “Who am I
The identity, a concept that answers to the questions “Who am I?” and “Who is the Other?”, therefore, is built in the interchange between the mind of individual (intra-psychic) and the comparison with the other (inter-psychic).
The human being needs the distinction, the differentiation from self, recognizing the own person as Self (“Who am I?”) only in relation to the difference with the Other (“Who is the Other?”).

5. WHAT’S THE FIRST DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE SELF AND THE OTHER?
“There is a deep need, specifically human, to define others and selves according to the gender; to attribute a male or female identity to the environment beyond the specifically sexual field” (Argentieri, 1988). ...so, when a child is born the first phrase said by clinicians or obstetricians is: “He is a handsome male!” or “She is a beautiful female!”.

6. To say “He is a handsome male. ” or “She is a beautiful female
To say “He is a handsome male!” or “She is a beautiful female!” means that an adult attributes a gender to an infant who is not aware of his/her sexual identity. This male or female gender attribution is based on the anatomical characteristics of the child: if he has a penis he will be a male, if she has a vagina she will be a female.
Is it really always so automatic? When a child recognized as female for her vagina will grow up, will she actually recognize herself as female? And can sometimes what adults see in the body – in this case, the vagina – be “misled”?

7. THE ABC OF SOME CONCEPTS USEFUL TO CLARIFY...
It appears important to deal with some base concepts that could allow us to answer to some difficult questions.
Who is the male? Who is the female? How can anyone say: “I’m a female and I’m not a male”? What does sexual orientation mean? What does gender identity mean? Which other identities are possible?
These are just some questions…but the questions are infinite, such as the identities…

8. SEXUAL IDENTITY: A MULTIDIMENSIONAL CONSTRUCT
Sexual identity refers to how a person thinks about him/her-self in relation to sexual and gender dimensions. It meets the condition of classification and stability. Therefore, it is also unpredictable and uncertain because it represents the outcome of a complex process due to the interaction between biological, psychological, socio-cultural and educational aspects. Sexual identity is composed by 4 factors: (1) biological sex; (2) gender identity; (3) sexual orientation and (4) gender role.

9. SEXUAL IDENTITY The 4 factors
BIOLOGICAL SEX
GENDER ROLE
SEXUAL ORIENTATION
GENDER IDENTITY
The 4 factors

10. BIOLOGICAL SEX
This term indicates the belonging to a biological and genetic category, or rather male/female.
It is constituted by sexual biological characteristics: sex chromosome (XY for male and XX for female), external genitals, gonads and sexual secondary characters (hair, chest, etc.) that develop during the puberty.

11. GENDER IDENTITY
Intimate, deep and subjective sense of belonging to social and cultural category of “male/female”, that is the subjective and deep recognition to belong to a sex and not to belong to the other one.
It is a complex process that starts since the birth and strengthens during the adolescence. When a child is 3-year-old is able to say: “I’m a male”, “I’m a female”. This multi-factorial process is the outcome of strong interactions between biological aspects, parental attitudes, education and socio-cultural context.
In some cases, it is possible not to perceive at all a belonging to nobody of both sexes and be in a not defined condition.

12. GENDER ROLE
Gender role is the combination of behaviours (acted within relationships with the others) and attitudes that, into a specific socio-cultural context, are recognized as traditionally masculine or feminine.
Gender role starts to be develop since 2 years old and it can change. Gender role expresses an adjustment to the socially shared norms about attributes and physical conditions, gesture, look, personality traits, personal hygiene, discourse and way of speaking, social interactions, interests, habits. These norms are considered gender-specific.
Everyone expects that a female child plays with dolls and that a male child plays with robots or violent toys.

13. SEXUAL ORIENTATION
Sexual orientation indicates the direction of sexuality and it is independent by gender. It has to be intended as a preponderance of feelings, erotic thoughts and sexual fantasies towards an individual with same sex (homosexuality), with other sex (heterosexuality) or both (bisexuality).
Sexual orientations develops during the adolescence, a very complex period full of conflicts, uncertainties and fears. The adolescence is a stage of transformations where the difficult process of sexual identity definition finds a main space.

14. “HOMOSEXUALITY IS NOT A MENTAL DISORDER AND THUS THERE IS NO NEED FOR CURE” (APA)
The homosexuality was deleted in 1973 from DSM-II, the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorder of the American Psychiatric Association (APA).
In 2000 the American Psychiatric Association wrote the report Position statement on therapies focused on attempts to change sexual orientation (Reparative or conversion therapies) in which every kind of psychiatric treatment based on the assumption that homosexuality is a mental disorder and addressed to modify the sexual orientation was forbidden.
In the August 2009, the American Psychological Association published the report Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation that, through a rich revision of the literature, demonstrated the inefficacy of reparative therapies.

15. DO SEX AND GENDER CORRESPOND? THE ISSUE OF TRANSSEXUALISMS
There are some people who live a “dissonance” between biological sex and gender identity. For example, a person who was born with male sex can grow up and feel as a woman. Transsexual people, often, report to feel as entrapped in a wrong body.
Such identity condition can create a lot of pains because it forces to deal with a difficult path of self acceptance but, first of all, to fight with the familiar, social and institutional disapproval.

16. TO BE BORN OR TO BECOME?
Is homosexuality, transsexualism, etc. a genetic and biological issue? Or is the social education stronger?
Such question is not soluble so easily. The relationship between nature and culture is so strong that it appears impossible to choose one of them. The “truth” is somewhere in-between...it is in their reciprocal influence.
Where is the error? In the split and binary position!
…that’s the simpler way to get to emerge
stereotypes, prejudices and stigma…

17. The possibility to cross the gender binarism is a reality and, since the origins of humanity, it has presented itself.
Different cultures show the possibility of the absence of correspondence between biological sex and feeling to belong to a specific sexual gender, beyond the pathologization.

18. HIJIRA from India (Nanda, 1998)
BERDACHE, native American (Herdt, 1993)
HIJIRA from India (Nanda, 1998)

19. MUXÉ from Zapoteca Mexican society
(Miano Borruso, 2002, 2011)
FA’ AFAFINE from Samoa (Mageo, 1992; Schmidt, 2003)

20. Thai KATHOEY (Totman, 2011)
FEMMINIELLI from Naples (Zito, Valerio, 2010)

21. The construction of a third-gender, that put together femininity and masculinity, is a phenomenon of many cultures in different ages but, in Naples, it assumes specific characteristics...

22. The Neapolitan Femminielli

23. In Naples there is a very particular kind of subjectivities that we can include into transgender world. They are femminielli – as they are called by folk – men who feel and live as women.

24. DEFINITION PROBLEMS...
There many problems related to the definition of such identity. They can be simultaneously effeminate, Mediterranean and ethnical homosexuals, transgenders, transvestites, transsexuals At the bottom, femminielli do not satisfy any of these identities because they represent a “third gender” placed in a specific cultural reality.

25. AN HYPOTHESIS The femminielli: are not simply transvestites
are not just effeminate homosexuals
are not a literary invention of 50’s
…Probably, they represent a particular reality, the archetype of a third gender that is both archaic and post-modern …

26. …Borderline identities in a borderline context…
They are, in fact, not simply classifiable “subjectivities” but they are historically belonging to the Neapolitan context. Femminielli express their social identity in a neither masculine or feminine way, containing both of them, with borderline characteristics but adjusted with the context: Naples, European city stretched out toward the Mediterranean, symbol of which is in a crossroad between archaic stratifications and postmodern drives.
…Borderline identities in a borderline context…

27. The identity of femminielli appears possible departing from a transformed, disguised,  transfigured body, a complex reality that could be considered “endemic”, or rather specifically linked to the territory and the population of the city.

28. Such phenomenon is knowledgeable into the Mediterranean cultural context and it is expression of a patriarchal, genderist and heterosexist culture, in which the feminization of the male is stigmatized, but…

29. …paradoxically it is influenced by a very ancient and deep cultural Mediterranean tradition of valorization of the femininity also documented by representations of it in archeology and art history…

30. 7.Matres Matutae “Ex-voto”
1.Venere of Savignano
a.C.
4.Venere of Malta
a.C.
3.Venere of Willendorf
a.C.
2.Venere of
Balzi Rossi
a.C.
5.Goddess in throne Catalhoyuk
6500 a.C. circa
7.Matres Matutae “Ex-voto”
VI-V a.C.
8.Magna Mater Cybele
III-II a.C.
6. Mater Matuta
VI-V a.C.
10.Madonna of Pompei
9.Madonna of Montevergine

31. During the long history of Naples, femminielli found their “ecological niche” into popular historical neighborhoods, where they were always accepted and recognized as a social reality, because they are able to assume their own role and their own way of life.

32. The femminiello, although sometimes practices prostitution, enjoys the recognition of inhabitants of the alley, where he/she is integrated because he/she participates at the typical “fair” economy of the alley, and he/she is never perceived as deviant or dangerous.

33. Instead, however ambiguous, he/she is a very positive figure: he/she engages in housework, he/she sews and mends, he/she keeps company with elderly and he/she looks after the children of neighbors.

34. Femminiello is also mysteriously connected to a magic world disseminating fortune: he/she is often, in fact, responsible for the game of tombola or for distribution of his/her fortune in the riffles of neighborhood.
Finally, in the social construction of the femminielli universe, religious aspects are involved, especially that ones of Marian devotion in syncretism with other aspects.

35. The femminielli, in their social life, “officiate” many rituals in which other inhabitants of the neighborhood participate. These rites refer to key moments of collective life such as marriage, birth, baptism.

36. In these rites the femminiello shows a cross- dressing full of theatricality and joyous hilarity, with a salacious language and a more amplified and grotesque gestures.

37. ....a very particular and traditional rite is the pelgrim having place in Montevergine, a mountain near Avellino (Campania, Italy), since 1256.
The legend tells that in 1252, two homosexual men were discovered in intimate attitudes. For this reason, they were expelled from their country and sent to die of hunger and cold. To help them, the Black Madonna opened the sky pulling out the sun and saving them.
Since then, every 2 February a lot of people go to venerate the Black Madonna to the sanctuary founded by Saint William. Such ceremony is accompanied by a folk music called “tammurriata”.

38. When we speak about femminielli, however, today perhaps we should use the past.
It appears impossible to speak about the historical streets of Naples as in the past. In the recent decades, it has considerably changed in its socio-economic structure.

39. The old economy of the alley, constituted by craft and markets, by many “arranged” professions, even at the limit of legality, based on imaginative and bold strategies for survival, it is definitely addressed towards illegal trade administered by organized crime.
Gradually disappearing a particular social context that has always represented a warm and protective support, femminielli are at a turning point ...

40. DO THEY RISK THE “EXTINCTION”?

42. OR DO THEY SIMPLY CHANGE THEIR NAME AND FORM?

44. The probable extinction has the following causes:
Today very few femminielli seem to be survived and the most of them are very old.
The probable extinction has the following causes:
The social evolution in terms of multiplication of identity diversities;
The global drive to the cultural homogenization;
The transformation of urban fabric of Naples.

47. The figure of femminiello who lives in the slums of Naples has to be seen, understood and interpreted in the context of Naples.

48. Naples is a feminine city that brings in its culture the ancient feminine soul of the Mediterranean. The figure of femminiello can be taken as a metaphor of such soul.

49. The term “femminiello”, in fact, has a particularly significant strong allusion: it is grammatically a masculine term but, at the etymological and semantic level, it refers to the female world.
It seems to keep in touch with both sexuality and gender levels. So, on the one hand it is the light of the great linguistic inventiveness of Neapolitan language/dialect, on the other hand it shows the ways in which such phenomenon is considered in the social sphere.

50. In Naples, transvestism of femminielli differs from similar phenomena in other big cities.
It has, in fact, the characters of a natural diversity condition and of a sexual expression that has its own reality widely recognized and integrated in its social context with aspects of ritual sacredness deeply stratified in the culture.
Sacredness and social integration are related because the current rituality is very evident in the representation of social ceremonies (marriage, birth, baptism), together with the exercise of various forms of divination and with the recognized power to bring good luck (eg. tombola).

51. Naples is a city that, in its particular culture, carries on the ancient feminine soul of the Mediterranean.
Under this aspect, it is a feminine city and therefore it allows men to express the feminine side of their nature also in a context that, for a long time, has been affected by the patriarchal order dating back to the Greek colonization of the eighth century B.C.

52. The femminiello makes the overcoming of his own masculinity on a ritual and symbolic level: he perpetuates its symbiosis with the Mother without achieving a complete assimilation at the biological level.
Such element could be the distinctive feature of this kind of transgenderism, combined with a stratified archaic ancestry in the peculiar cultural context of origin. At a socio- anthropological level, the specificity of femminielli seems to have perpetuated the archaic tradition of ritual and psychological identification with the original feminine (Great Mother)

53. The female soul of Naples is shown in the Siren, a Neapolitan symbol ancient as the origins of the city and linked to the legend of Partenope
The Siren is half woman and half bird and she is a symbol of self-sufficient femininity

54. So, we can talk about a “third gender”, with its typical universe of senses, expression of other identities very different from both the female and male ones. It is possible thank to a friendly and tolerant social context.

56. Thanks for your attention!
End
Thanks for your attention!