These popular pseudoscientific racial ideologies were at all times mediated by modern bourgeois notions of gender and sexuality. As Anne McClintock has argued, the invention of race and the project of imperialism were “fundamental aspects of Western, industrial modernity.” Because of this, gender, race, and class were (are) not distinct areas of experience. Rather, they “come into existence in and through relation to each other—if in contradictory and conflictual ways.” Italy’s politicians, novelists, scientists, journalists, travel writers, and other popularizers of race discourse routinely made use of sexual idioms to feminize and sexualize the South. One of the most popular tracts on the “two Italies,” Contemporary Barbarian Italy, published in 1898 by Alfredo Niceforo, called the people of Naples “dissolute and weak by nature,” a “feminine people.” Similarly, Ippolito Nievo, a writer and member of the nationalist troops during the “liberation” of the South, expressed the opinions of many of his fellow soldiers when he wrote, “The Sicilians are all women; they have a passion for tumult and drama.”
The criminologists also argued that women’s deviance diff ered from men’s; and their studies on female criminal pathology advanced their belief that southern peasant women were naturally inclined toward crime, especially prostitution. To them, sexual deviance (which included homosexuality) was the result of madness, depravity, and poverty, each of which were considered inherent traits. In 1893, the same year the uprisings erupted across Sicily, Lombroso and Ferrero published these arguments in La donna delinquente (The Criminal Woman), one of their most influential texts. This work advanced their elaborate typologies of criminal behavior, on the basis of a racial classification that divided Italy into three sections—the Semitic (Arab) South, the Latin Center, and the Germanic, Ligurian, Celtic, and Slavic North—with the South inferior to the rest of Italy. It also proposed that southern Italian men, unlike their northern European counterparts, “were sexually precocious, wasting their lives in the pursuit and enslavement of women, rather than working for the ‘advancement of society.’” Thus, they eroticized the entire South and projected onto the region patriarchal power.
baratheonpilled
romaincrisis
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
origamiaround
titsay
areudirty
discoholicmusic
izzy806
