Blake De Luca (he/they) is a PhD student in the Department of Italian Studies.
Their research applies queer studies to Early Modern Italy (1300-1650), examining genderqueer figures on two parallel planes: that of representation, which analyzes the tropes, recurring rhetoric and general treatment in literature and visual arts, and the sociocultural, which considers medical and legal documents to more clearly reconstruct the categorization and attitudes towards gender binarity in the Early Modern.
Blake’s long-term objective is twofold: to create a space for queer Early Modern studies, and in doing so to foreground the continued existence of gender divergence throughout European history, as a critical step in establishing the rightful place in history (past, present and future) of individuals and subjects outside of the gender binary.
