At the end of the first full week of classes in Florence, two of my friends and I decided to take a weekend trip and explore a new part of Italy. We did not go into the trip with anything more than two nights booked in two different hostels and an itinerary proposed by my host parents to visit three nearby cities: Perugia, Assisi, and Lake Trasimeno. The trip turned out to be one of the most fun and culturally rewarding of the semester, yet it was my short stay in Perugia that inspired me to focus this paper on Amanda Knox. Before arriving in Florence, I had never heard of Amanda Knox. Maybe it was because I did not live in Washington or simply because it never came up at school, but hearing about her story was fascinating. Here was a girl who left the States during her junior year, just like most everyone else in the Gonzaga in Florence program, yet the similarities from that point stop almost immediately. Knox’s predicament of facing a murder charge, being humiliated by the European media, being convicted of the murder of her roommate, serving four years in a foreign jail thousands of miles from home, and finally given a chance for appeal and receiving an acquittal of those murder charges is almost impossible to imagine, let alone accept as reality. Read more…
In a heteronormative world, the narrative of a sexual dissident can be comparatively characterized as that of a traveler. The cultural norms, attitudes and expectations threaten to be anything but familiar. A heterosexual hegemony challenges the perceived other to adapt and acculturate in a social milieu that may or may not value their presence in society. In society’s gravest failings, a heterosexist authority reduces this traveler to a marginalized role suffered by that of a vagabond. In society’s most honorable accomplishments, a heteronormative culture becomes self-conscious and the social norms of the past are deconstructed to make a home for the weary traveler. With any hope, the weary traveler of the past will be the prosperous cosmopolitan of the future. Italy has been both a gracious and crude host over time. Cultural attitudes in Italy’s history have at times appeared as temperamental as the winds that brought prosperity and prevalence to the peninsula’s ports. Even before considering the “anxieties of anachronism”, one can at least acknowledge the possible acceptable existence of homosexuality in ancient Rome and the Renaissance. In search of an equilibrium echoing justice, contemporary society turns to the promising stabilizer of globalization. Despite its limitations, globalization offers an opportunity for social consciousness and change. Read more...
