Teresa Valentini

Teresa Valentini’s postdoctoral research lies at the intersection of Italian contemporary philosophy, sociology, literature and women and gender studies. Her driving questions emerge from the Italian contemporary male theorists’  “obsession" with “impotence/impotentiality” (Agamben, Berardi, Virno).  By bringing to light and understanding the undergirding gender power dynamics surrounding this concept’s history and literary representation, Valentini’s research will reclaim impotentiality as a fruitful theoretical tool for queering normative masculinity, empowering women, and understanding contemporary forms of social disengagement.

Funded by the Connaught Scholarship for International Doctoral Students and the Mary H. Beatty Fellowship, Dr. Valentini earned her PhD at the Centre for Comparative Literature at U of T in May 2024 with a dissertation entitled “Modernist Impotentiality: James Joyce, Italo Svevo, and Franz Kafka.” She is now preparing her first monograph which will deal with European modernist male authors’ revaluation of forms of impotentiality such as inertia, the choice to not-act, or refusal to work, as ways to resist the priority of action and actualization that has fueled the ideology of the nation-state, normative masculinity, and capitalist exploitation.