Tratamiento de la violencia de género en la Teleserie Cubana Rompiendo

The last aspect I want to bring up in this chapter is the relationship between queer theory and the Italian question of nationality, by which I mean the relative use of queer theory in a very specific national context. Models of same-sex desire and sexuality vary in relation to different national contexts, and therefore the use of queer theory can also change considering that it was born and developed in an Anglo-American context. In Italy, queer theory is not an established tool of investigation or practice, and we need to ask questions about the reasons behind this limited presence.

For anyone engaged in research on male homosexuality and same-sex desire in Italian studies, Derek Duncan’s Reading and Writing Italian

64 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 3.

65 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 10

66 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 11.

67 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 11.

Homosexuality: A Case of Possible Difference, is a fundamental source of analysis. ⁶⁸ Duncan analyzes the public presence of homosexuality in contemporary Italian society and the visibility of gay men and women in Italy, looking for historical reasons behind these specific conditions. The first element we need to take into account is that Italy became a nation only in modern times, in 1861. Before this date, it was divided into separate states, each of which had its own legislation about homosexuality, resulting in different notions of sexuality as well. In certain areas homosexuality was penalized whereas in others it was not even acknowledged. In the twentieth century, Fascism struggled to decide how to tackle homosexuality. The so-called “Codice Rocco”, dated 1930, did not criminalize homosexuality, on the implicit assumption that denying such an aberration was the best solution. Cultural history – for example the notion of masculinity as forged by Fascism – shows us how certain imposed models attempted to (re)shape society, gender roles, and sexuality.⁶⁹

Historians, among whom Lorenzo Benadusi and Sandro Bellassai are perhaps the most notable,⁷⁰ have started to research these issues and any study of sexuality, sex, and gender that wants to acknowledge a sense of difference and specificity needs to consider these historical elements. Duncan and Benadusi also investigate the misreading of the homosexual body by the law in Italy. In 1936, the Fascist government introduced a battery of legislation that aimed to defend the race and, for the first time after 1870, homosexual acts were criminalized. A prosecutor in Catania, Carlo Molina, found a case of 42 men engaged in same-sex activities and decided to investigate the matter by requesting a medical examination of the anus to check on possible alterations due to penetration. This demonstrates a misreading of the homosexual body as only passively penetrated which is specific to Italy and, as argued by Robert Aldrich, in most Mediterranean countries.⁷¹ This is something that was not

68 Derek Duncan, Reading and Writing Italian Homosexuality: A Case of Possible Difference, Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006.

69 See chapter 5.8.

70 See Sandro Bellassai and Maria Malatesta, Genere e mascolinità. Uno sguardo storico, Roma: Bulzoni, 2000; Lorenzo Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo. L’omosessualità nell’esperimento totalitario fascista, Milano: Feltrinelli, 2005. Trans. Suzanne Dingee, and Jennifer Pudney. The Enemy of the New Man: Homosexuality in Fascist Italy, Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 2012.

71 Robert Aldrich, The Seduction of the Mediterranean, Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy, London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

present in the British context as I will discuss in chapter two. The particular geopolitical Italian structure before unification also caused a misreading by upper-class English men who thought of Italian men as more open to the possibility of same-sex relationships because of the absence of any legislation.⁷² After being “diagnosed” with homosexuality, Maurice is advised by a hypnotherapist to move to Italy where homosexuality is not punishable.⁷³ Sexual identity in the Italian context is intertwined with issues of class, economics, and national difference. The opposition between the North and South of Italy comes with another stereotype according to which Southern Italian men have sex with each other to compensate the unavailability of unmarried women and these sexual acts do not question their identity as heterosexual. Mario Mieli presents an explanation of the peculiarity of anal activities in Italy with the concept of “maschio doppio” as the heterosexual man who penetrates another man without feeling challenged in his heterosexuality.⁷⁴

The South would be a sort of a sexual homoerotic paradise: a notion that does complicate the understanding of homosexuality seen, as Duncan suggests, as a “non-transparent category”.⁷⁵ For this reason paraphrasing Duncan’s words we could use the expression “something like homosexuality”⁷⁶ in the Italian context to indicate the opacity this category carries. If sexual identity in other contexts is explained thorough the gender of the object choice, in Italy it is more a matter of geopolitics. This is linked also to an attribution of value of the role in sexual acts that assimilates passivity to femininity and, by extension, to homosexuality, whereas activity remains linked to masculinity and heterosexuality even if the subject engages in same-sex sexual acts. The considerations are fundamental for every study of sex/ sexuality/ gender in the Italian context and therefore relevant for my analysis of Ernesto and Saba.

72 See for example John Addington Symonds, E.M.Forster, travelled to Italy with the idea that men were keener to have sex with other men. André Gide travelled to Africa and had the same vision about the place, orientalising and charging with sexual fantasy the locals. See Aldrich, The Seduction, especially chapter 3, “Englishmen in Southern Europe, p 69-100.

73 In Forster’s earlier novels Italy is represented as the place where desire can flow freely. See Where Angels Fear to Thread (1905) especially the relationship between Gino and Philip and A Room with a View (1908) where Lucy finds in Italy the place to let her feelings flourish.

74 Mario Mieli, Elementi di critica omosessuale, Milano: Feltrinelli, 2002, 129. For an exhaustive analysis of Mieli’s book in English see Duncan, Reading and writing, 150-153.

75 See Duncan, Reading, 4.

76 Duncan, Reading, 12. I will come back to this concept in chapter 8.

I want now to move to some reflections about gay studies and queer theory in the field of Italian studies. While in the 1980s and 1990s in the Anglo-American context gay studies and queer theory had been giving space to issues linked to gender, sexuality and same-sex desire within academia, in Italy there has been a tendency to avoid these topics. In his 1999 article “The ‘white hole’

of Italian gay studies”,⁷⁷ Marco Pustianaz analyses the reasons for the absence of these studies in the specific Italian context, and explains why he prefers the metaphor of the “white hole” over that of the “closet”: “the violent dialectics of power that typically produces the awareness of the closet and that of its opposite, the public space of discourse, is typically muted in Italy” (1).

The five reasons he singles out apply, in my view, to the reluctance to accept queer theory too. The first reason is “the widespread culture of homosexual invisibility and its resistance to ‘uncloseted gayness’” (1). A relative invisibility surrounds male homosexuality in a society where homosexuality cannot be spoken of overtly, a sort of refusal of using identity names.

The second problem Pustianaz analyzes is a “resistance and failure to theorize a politics of difference”. He refers to an Italian lack of politicization in the gay liberation movement that, since the 1970s, has been focusing on homologation rather than resistance. This emphasis on sameness and the fight by activists for equal rights leaves, according to him, no room for queerness and multiplicity. There is no such thing as gay history in the Italian context, and this leads to a difficult relation between political and cultural activism. This means an almost complete absence of gay and lesbian researchers in academia at the time of the article. Another serious issue Pustianaz’s analysis points out is the lack of interdisciplinary approaches in Italian academia. Since gay studies require multidisciplinarity, there cannot be space for syllabuses that offers modules on gay studies. This is linked to the fourth point: the lack of an explicit demand for gay studies on the part of students. According to Pustianaz, gay studies need empowerment by gay students, especially because there are no gay student organizations. The final point underlined by the article is the political question of how academic staff are recruited, especially the difficulties for researchers or students interested or working in the field of gay studies.

77 http://old.www.gay-web.de/fluss/konferenz/pdf/pustianaz.pdf (accessed: 19.09.2011).

Pustianaz wrote this article in 1999 and he spoke about gay and lesbian studies so I want to see how and if the situation has changed since then and if the same analysis can be applied to queer theory. I think the context has slightly improved since Pustianaz’s analysis, at least because there is more research on and attention to studies on sexuality, gender and sex. Despite most scholarly work being based in foreign institutions, multidisciplinarity is developing and in the last few years there have been some publications on queer theory. Although it is still not a common tool of analysis in Italian studies there has been a proliferation of interests, conferences and studies that point to a change in direction.

The new attention to the national question I have already mentioned has produced some interesting research in queer theory in the Italian context.

Besides Duncan’s book, which I have already mentioned and which I will be using in my work, there are other interventions that are worth mentioning.

One of the first books to explicitly give an account of queer theory in the Italian context is Queer Italia,⁷⁸ published in 2004. It is a collection of essays that investigate same-sex desire in literature and cinema in the Italian context throughout the centuries and the fact that the publications on the Italian context are written in English is a confirmation of the reluctance of Italian critics to endorse queer theory.

In 2011, the volume Queer in Europe,⁷⁹ a collection of case studies, examined the notion of Europe in connection with queer, proposing a resistance to the Anglo-American queer theory dominance and focusing on national cultural specificity. Although there is only one chapter dedicated to Italy, written by Luca Malici on queer television,⁸⁰ it gives, in my view, an idea of new interests.

Also in 2011, Marco Pustianaz edited a volume in Italian, Queer in Italia.

Differenze in movimento,⁸¹ which is a collection of interviews with young scholars and individuals involved in any queer practice (intellectual, political,

78Gary P. Cestaro ed., Queer Italia. Same-sex desire in Italian literature and film, London:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

79 Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett eds., Queer in Europe, Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011.

80 Luca Malici, “Queer in Italy: Italian Televisibility and the ‘Queerable’ Audience”, 113-128, in Downing and Gillett, eds., Queer in Europe.

81 Marco Pustianaz, ed., Queer in Italia. Differenze in movimento, Pisa: ETS, 2011.

sociological, social etc.). Interviewees are asked questions about the relevance of queer in their lives and their personal and intellectual relationship with queer and queer theory. It is a very interesting overview of current research on queer theory. Almost all of the interviewees raised the issue of the availability of texts and the necessity to go abroad and to read in a foreign language in order to find available books.

The last point I want to mention about the relationship between queer theory and Italian studies is the (near) absence of books on queer theory in translation. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble was translated into Italian only in 2004 and Sedgwick’s Epistemology of Closet only in 2011.⁸²

All these specific elements are what, I think, is profitable to take into account when studying queer theory in the Italian context. We need to use queer theory to interrogate texts, to interpret them from a different perspective in order to stretch the space for investigation. My methodology is a combination of queer theories, an understanding of sexuality and desire as structuring the novels I am studying and the lives of Forster and Saba while negotiating with a heteronormative society. I am interested in how issues of sexuality were shaped in specific historical and cultural moments, as I believe we cannot understand the complexity of these issues otherwise. Susan McCabe, talking about queer identification, argues for a queer historicism that takes into account a mapping of sexual practices but at the same time understands that “sexualities are socially constructed and can take multiple forms”.⁸³ I see my use of queer theory as very close to this definition, but I also add to my investigation an understanding of sexuality that is as much psychological as it is historically and culturally constructed.

82 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Stanze private. Epistemologia e politica della sessualità, trans. by Federico Zappino, Roma: Carocci, 2011.

83 Susan McCabe, “To Be and To Have, The Rise of Queer Historicism” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 11(2005): 119-134.

CHAPTER 2

From homophilia to sexual scandals: debates on sexuality in late nineteenth-century Britain

2.1 Introduction

In this chapter I will investigate how Forster’s understanding of homosexuality is especially informed by the work of John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter. I will argue that Forster renegotiates the debates and transports them into a fictional world, sometimes relying on some of their ideas, and occasionally departing from them and criticising them. In doing so, he presents diverse examples of how the experience of homosexuality can be lived by different characters. In addition to the influence of Symonds and Carpenter, other discourses shaped the debates on same-sex desire in Britain to the extent that the particular context of the nineteenth century is often referred to as

“homophile England”.¹ Forster is well aware of all such discourses and he uses them as a reference either to accept or reshape them in his own writings. Only by looking at the context in which these debates were formed and developed is it possible to fully understand what was at stake in Forster’s presentation of what I believe to be his fictional theorization of homosexuality in writing Maurice.