This paper parses the discourses of family, the nation and deviance in contemporary Italy. It questions how Italy’s far-right paints both queer Italians and recent immigrants as a dual threat to the proper national family. Queer subjects menace because they are thought too non-reproductive. Foreigners are, instead, considered too reproductive, as immigrants’ birthrates have come to outpace those of Italian-born women. In this logic, the national family is always-already heterosexual and bound to propagate straight, racially-similar individuals. More specifically, this paper offers a close-reading of Alessandra Mussolini’s critique of Vlamidir Luxuria on the TV show Porta a porta. In that appearance, Mussolini famously declared “meglio fascista che frocio!”; furthermore, she identifies homosexuals, transgender people, and “extracomunitari” as an “outside” menace, threatening the beleaguered national family―personified in the seemingly sympathetic figure of the mamma. Family is here both a sign of racial/sexual continuity and a source of increasing anxiety. The latter half of this paper examines queer denunciations of Mussolini’s rhetoric, inviting a rethinking of the supposed distance between the insulted and the insulter.
15. “Meglio fascista che frocio!”: Denouncing the National Family in Modern Italy
