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.