Being Third Gender, Being Neapolitan: Culture, History, and the ‘Femminielli’

This book introduces the Neapolitan 'femminielli', their customs and practices through a series of essays originally published in Italian and newly translated into English. Historically present in the city of Naples, Italy and surrounding provinces, femminielli express their social identity in a form that is neither masculine nor feminine but contains both, and has liminal characteristics. Contributors weave historical, socio-cultural, literary, iconographic, and artistic traces to explore different facets of this human experience and demonstrate the extreme complexity of what they observed. Their efforts show the femminielli to be a very articulated and at the same time fluid reality, multifaceted and dynamic, in relation to its contextual dimensions. Scholars and university students of Cultural Anthropology, Psychology, Gender Studies, History, Performance, and Literature will all find something engaging and timely in this collection.