Chapter 14 - The Inversion of Europa: Reconfiguring the Utopia through the Gaze of the Femminiello in Mater Natura (Andrei, 2005)

This chapter analyzes the femminiello Europa, a character in the film Mater Natura (Andrei, 2005). Due to the main task of Europa, who proposes to es- cape from the metropolitan context together with the rest of the collective to materialize their utopia on the slope of Vesuvius, the research hypothesis is based on clarifying the symbolic function of both the identity conditions of the character and the utopian project itself. In order to achieve the objectives, a contextualization of this case of non-normative gender and its link to the Neapolitan cultural environment and its representation in the cinematographic discourse is carried out. In this way, the aim is to identify some of the represen- tative signs of its intersectionality of identity and, subsequently, to examine how they are recoded through the character in order to devise its utopian proposal.