CONTENT WARNINGS: In this conversation, Francesca and Lenh talk about experiences with coming to terms with your identity, queerphobia in various forms (having to hide your identity, intrusive questions, harassment, the concept of heterophobia), family, conservative/religious environments, living in a very white world (as a white person), wanting to fit in and marginalized folks oppressing each other.
There is a mention of family cutting ties with folks for being queer on page 4. There is some swearing throughout the text.
Francesca
february 2020
@quietblizzard
My name is Francesca, I’m from Italy, as the name suggests, pronouns she/her. I also don’t care when people use gender-neutral pronouns for me, I know some people get really upset… I also don’t care if by mistake someone calls me ‘he’. If you’re not trying to be offensive or discriminatory, I don’t mind. If you have malicious intentions, then f*ck you. But, you know, I’m pretty elastic.
“I really like the power trip of reclaiming something that used to be offensive.”
I like to go by ‘queer’ for a couple of reasons. First of all, I like that it’s such an inclusive umbrella term, because sometimes even with simple things like saying ‘Oh, I’m part of the LGBT-community’, LGBT is not enough, then there’s QIA, then there’s the plus – I like ‘queer’. I like things that are streamlined. Also, as a linguist, I really like the power trip of reclaiming something that used to be offensive.
So, yes, I really like the word ‘queer’. I find it easy, also because, as it happens with a lot of people that are not 100 % straight or 100 % homosexual, I’ve had long phases of not knowing exactly what was going on. I liked men, then I realized that I was also into women, but they were kind of compartmentalized periods in my life. So, it was always ‘Oh, so I used to be straight, but now I’m a lesbian’, and now I’m like ‘Or maybe I’m just queer?’ Like, that’s fine too. So, I guess the most exact term would be ‘bi’ or ‘pan’, I don’t really mind either, but I very much like ‘queer’.
Oh, and what do I do with my life? I’m a teacher in training as well as a translator, and please look to your left and tell me what my hobby is [gestures to a big bookshelf in her studio] – it’s reading. I do a lot of reading. I also have a YouTube-channel and a podcast! They’re in Italian and they’re both about literature. My channel, it’s a bit more general in the sense that I talk about the things that I read and more general literature topics, whereas the podcast I do with a friend who’s from Rome and it’s about monsters in literature. The episode we’re currently working on is about Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus. All the content is in Italian, both cannel and podcast. On Instagram, the content is mostly English though.
That’s me!
Lenh: I’m interested in your podcast and the YouTube-channel, can you tell me how that started?
Well, the YouTube-channel started one and a half year ago (editorial note: as of September 2020), because I had been following some channels and I made friends with some of the people that ran them, and they were kinda like ‘O my god, you should really start one, you know your shit and you’re good at explaining!’ And at one point I was like ‘Ok, f*ck it, I’m gonna do it!’, and I started doing it.
And then in September last year, I had actually already planned by myself that I wanted to do a series of thematic videos about monsters and literature, because that’s what I’d studied, and then one of the girls I befriended, she kind of put me in contact with this guy, who also has a channel…
He wanted to do a podcast about monsters, and he wanted to doublecheck with her if he had listed the most important ones and bladibla, and she was like ‘Why don’t you just talk to Francesca about it, she’s the right person!’. So we started talking about it, and then after a day or two of talking, it was kinda like ‘Do you just want to do the podcast with me?’ and I was like ‘Yes!?’, and that’s how it started. He’s also a literature student. He’s from Rome and lives in Rome, so he does it from there and I do it from here, and then, with the magic of editing, he puts it all together.
L: I know there’s this whole field of studies about the relations between monsters, bodies and queerness, does it also go into that direction?
Sometimes it does, if it’s pertinent to the type of monster we discuss. For example the second episode was on Dracula, so, when talking about vampires and vampirism, the whole queerness topic really worked into that. As far as I know, I’m the queer half of the podcast. Actually, when we are recording, to muffle some the ‘Fs’ and the ‘Ss’ and things like that, I have socks on top of my microphone, and the outermost one is a rainbow sock. Everything I touch becomes instantly queerified! That’s just how it is [laughs].
“Everything I touch becomes instantly queerified!”
