by Marzia D’Amico

June Scialpi’s poetry embodies a poetics of queerness and Southerness, intertwining marginalized identities, historical inheritances, and the fluidity of selfhood. Her work resists dominant cultural narratives by contesting patriarchal structures and advocating for an identity shaped through relationality, vulnerability, and transformation. This study examines how her engagement with themes of conflict and magic reframes the queer subject through a Southern Italian lens, where ritual and myth provide an alternative to normative frameworks of identity. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theorization of the “closet” and Ernesto De Martino’s studies on Southern Italian rituality, this analysis explores how Scialpi’s poetry negotiates repression, self-determination, and cultural resistance. By positioning queerness and Southerness as intertwined modes of non-normative existence, Scialpi’s poetics articulates a vision of subjectivity that rejects rigid categorizations, embracing instead the generative possibilities of instability, disobedience, and self-invention. Through the lenses of obliquity, conflict, and magic, her work challenges not only traditional notions of gender and sexuality but also the hegemonic cultural hierarchies that have historically marginalized the South.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15781/PVSM-HG54