From Prostitution to Transsexuality: Gender Identity and Subversive Sexuality in Dacia Maraini

Eppure ci deve essere un modo più ricco e fluido di essere sessuati senza cacciarsi dentro un destino da etichetta.

--from Lettere a Marina

Dacia Maraini's work has frequently explored and exposed the social proscriptions which regulate adherence to coherent socio-sexual behavior rooted in a naturalized gender identity. Maraini's characters were exploding the limits of a traditional notion of gender roles even before Adrienne Rich published in 1980 her seminal article, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," problematizing the relationship between sexuality and gendered behavior. More than a decade earlier, for example, in Maraini's first play, La famiglia normale (1967), Millo the son enters the set in cross-dress, in his sister's "vestaglia, aperta sul petto e porta in testa un cappellino di velluto marrone" (12). By examining four exemplary moments in Maraini's work from the 1970s to the 1990s, we will highlight Maraini's groundbreaking contributions to the ongoing discourse on the deconstruction of gender identity and sexuality. From this perspective, we will analyze Dialogo di una prostituta con un suo cliente, Donna in guerra, Lettere a Marina and "Chi ha ucciso Paolo Gentile?" from Buio. We will also study the risks inherent in these protagonists' nonconformity. In Maraini's world, subversive behavior usually provokes hostile and dangerous reactions, a danger that often, but not always, derives from "l'ostile e affascinante mondo dei padri" (72) that the critic M. Grazia Sumeli Weinberg has so eloquently theorized in Maraini's work. ¹

In the seventies Maraini's explorations of gender identity radiated from, but were not limited to, assumptions about a woman's "nature." An early example of this occurs in Dialogo di una prostituta con un suo cliente, which was written in 1973 and has been produced in over twenty-five countries (Wright 85). ² In this play, the question "What is a woman?" is fused to the question "What is a prostitute?" as Maraini explores the metaphor of prostitution for women's subaltern condition in society. ³ A legacy from Il teatro della Maddalena, this play seeks to subvert the historical role of the female character (and the body of the actress) as the form of desire which, in Maraini's words, belongs to the father, through a jarring reversal of established gender and sexual roles. The play upsets the comfortable separation between actor and spectator, between the so-called active player and passive audience, by interrupting the action onstage with impromptu actor-audience debates on prostitution that disrupt, in Brechtian fashion, the facile dichotomy between the fictive and the real. In so doing, the play seeks simultaneously to dismantle theatrical and gender conventions to allow women more active, more flexible and more complex roles both off and on stage. ⁴

In a contribution to a panel on "Eroticism, Sexual Identity and Politics" in an international conference for women playwrights, Maraini extends the phallogocentrism of a hegemonic social order to include the artistic production of theater:

The body of pleasure belongs to the father. The word, which reveals religious and social truth, is a father's word. . . . The erotic theatrical language is always male, even when it is totally impregnated by female forms. For, as Ida Magli, a well-known Italian anthropologist, says, "Women have always been the words with which men speak to each other." (France and Corso 153)

Expanding on the notion of the erotic in theater, Maraini continues: "The most erotic body is by convention that of the prostitute. The body most offered and therefore most bending to male pleasure. The most passive body, and therefore the most available, according to the rules of the distribution of roles, to the assault of the other" (153). Dialogo remains one of Maraini's best efforts to subvert this convention.

The play begins with a lightning exchange of dialogue between the prostitute Manila and her client that immediately reveals Manila's attempt to gain the...