CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2010
| Author | Andits, Eszter Helga |
|---|---|
| Title | "Sore on the nation's body": Repression of homosexuals under Italian Fascism |
| Summary | Abstract This thesis is written about Italian Fascism and its repression of homosexuality, drawing on primary sources of Italian legislation, archival data, and on the few existent (and in most of the cases fragmentary) secondary literatures on this puzzling and relatively under-represented topic. Despite the absence of proper criminal laws against homosexuality, the Fascist regime provided its authorities with the powers to realize their prejudices against homosexuals in action, which resulted in sending more hundreds of “pederasts” to political or common confinement. Homosexuality, which during the Ventennio shifted from being viewed “only” immoral to be a real danger to the grandness of the race, was incompatible with the totalitarian Fascist plans of executing an “anthropological revolution” of the Italian population. Even though the homosexual repression grew simultaneously with the growing Italian sympathy towards Nazi Germany, this increased intolerance can not attributed only to the German influence. I would argue instead, that before the advent of Fascism, Italy had been the cradle of racist and homophobic ideas, which gained prominence mainly by the theories of Cesare Lombroso and other scientists of the positivist school. The positivist credo in preventive/punitive seclusion resuscitated institutional practices as diffida, ammonizione and domicilio coatto during the Fascist era, and deployed them as means to repress any phenomenon which did not conform to the regime's standards. |
| Supervisor | Iordachi, Constantin; Lojko, Miklos |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2010/andits_eszter.pdf |
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