by Loredana Di Martino
Narratives that provide honest portrayals of women’s relationships appear to be very popular at the moment. This may seem as nothing new since feminist authors have recast female friendship as a potential site of subversion at least since the seventies. However, as critics have highlighted, it is particularly since the eighties and nineties that representations of ambivalent female relations have become more prominent, mostly as a result of the influence of intersectional and decolonial theories such as those pioneered, respectively, by Audre Lorde and María Lugones. This article contextualizes Elena Ferrante’s work within the current transnational tendency of developing an ethics of female relations that does not underplay difference but rather investigates the emancipatory potential of the B-side of female friendships. I will argue that Ferrante both draws upon and expands the theory of intersubjective narrative signification developed by philosopher Adriana Cavarero in works such as Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. In tune with both Lorde’s and Lugones’s ideas, the Neapolitan novels examine how intersecting differences that challenge the notion of a perfect female relationality, and the form of a “relating narrative” as theorized by Cavarero, can nonetheless be reclaimed as an empowering tool for redefining subjectivity and projecting new forms of collective belonging through the art of storytelling.