by Frances Clemente

In his eponymous second album, released in 1979, Neapolitan musician and singer-songwriter Pino Daniele brought the femminiello to the forefront of the modern music scene for the first time with the track “Chillo è nu buono guaglione.” Inspired by a real-life figure from Naples’ historic centre, the song recounts the daily life of a femminiello, an individual deeply rooted in the Neapolitan territory who is biologically male but exhibits behaviors traditionally associated with the female gender, conveying the social constraints weighing on him and his desire for liberation. The track is part of a broader attempt to give voice to a marginalized subaltern South, musically intersecting with the rhythms and musical traditions of the Mediterranean and the Global South. Alongside Black people, workers, Neapolitan guaglioni and scarrafoni, femminielli animate Daniele’s anthropological repertoire, providing an alternative narrative to the hegemonic gender model and incorporating a distinct Southern counterculture. Daniele becomes the ultimate embodiment of “Neapolitan power,” asserting an intersectional otherness of race, class, and gender, the legacy of which would be taken up by dub culture from the 1990s onwards, ultimately evolving into an overt political statement. This article investigates the assertion of subaltern otherness expressed through Daniele’s music by focusing on “Chillo è nu buono guaglione,” considering the more problematic aspects of this assertion and ultimately positing a queer Southern intersectionality for which the singer-songwriter acts as a spokesperson.

DOI https://doi.org/10.15781/934A-HP03