Tra «male gaze» e incapacità di vedere. Una lettura del racconto Il seno nudo di Italo Calvino
Between “Male Gaze” and the Inability to See. Italo Calvino’s Short Story The Naked Bosom

Summary/Abstract: Through an analysis of the strategies of gaze enacted by Palomar in the short story The Naked Bosom (1977), the article aims to highlight the convergence between the literary problematic brought up by Calvino and the theoretical reflection addressed by Laura Mulvey in her seminal article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), that is, the difficulty for the male subject to establish with the female body a representational relationship that goes beyond any aesthetic evaluation and alienating patterns with respect to woman’s subjectivity. Starting from this premise, the article aims to analyze the inadequacy of the male observer on two different levels: the historical one, which concerns the crisis of masculinity generated by the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, and the theoretical/conceptual one, which concerns the checkmate of the representation of the feminine, object of a critical elaboration – towards the Western thought, imaginary, language and symbolic order – brought to light in those very years. In this regard, the analysis will be based on some concepts drawn from the thought of sexual difference (pensée de la différence sexuelle), referring especially to the work of Luce Irigaray in France and Carla Lonzi in Italy.

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