Non toccare l'uomo bianco

‘As long as race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people.’ (Richard Dyer, p.1)

Who am I to write about the cinepanettone? I don't mean so much ‘what right have I as a foreigner?’, though I know some colleagues feel I can never appreciate how offensive these films are because I'm not Italian. I mean rather that the pleasure that I take in the cinepanettone, a pleasure that certainly motivates my academic sympathy for the form, is facilitated by my sexuality, ethnicity and gender. I write as a non-Italian, yes; but I write as a white heterosexual male, vicariously enjoying the bad behaviour of white heterosexual males. My scholarly discourse on the cinepanettone is therefore necessarily subjective, enabled if not determined by a privileged position that is assumed as normative by the films themselves.