Suchergebnisse

The objective of this article is to compare the concept of brutalization, analyzed by George Mosse, with the civilizing process, described by Norbert Elias. The intellectual life of these German-Jewish scholars will be reconstructed through the study of their relationships and their similar life experience. In this way, I'll try to demonstrate that the apparent contrast between their different points of view is much more nuanced. Civilization and brutalization were not opposed processes that excluded one another. Therefore, a clearer understanding of the Great War can be best achieved through a combined reading of these two interconnected processes; and it is only by examining their interaction that we can understand the postwar period and the rise of Fascism and Nazism more fully.

Intro -- Contents -- Foreword by Emilio Gentile -- Acknowledgments -- Glossary -- Introduction: Against Nature: Masculinity and Homosexuality -- 1. The Making of the Virile Italian -- 2. The Discovery of Homosexuality -- 3. Sodomy: Sin or Crime -- 4. The Repression of Homosexuality -- 5. Madmen or Criminals -- 6. The Political Use of Homosexuality -- 7. Bourgeois Respectability and Fascist Morality -- Notes -- Index.

In this first in-depth historical study of homosexuality in Fascist Italy, Lorenzo Benadusi brings to light immensely important archival documents regarding the sexual politics of the Italian Fascist regime; he adds new insights to the study of the complex relationships of masculinity, sexuality, and Fascism; he explores the connections between new Fascist values and preexisting Italian traditional and Roman Catholic views on morality; he documents both the Fascist regime's denial of the existence of homosexuality in Italy and its clandestine strategies and motivations for repressing and imprisoning homosexuals; he uncovers the ways that accusations of homosexuality (whether true or false) were used against political and personal enemies; and above all, he shows how homosexuality was deemed the enemy of the Fascist "New Man," an ideal of a virile warrior and dominating husband vigorously devoted to the "political" function of producing children for the Fascist state. Benadusi investigates the regulation and regimentation of gender in Fascist Italy, and the extent to which, in uneasy concert with the Catholic Church, the regime engaged in the cultural and legal engineering of masculinity and femininity. He cites a wealth of unpublished documents, official speeches, letters, coerced confessions, private letters and diaries, legal documents, and government memos to reveal and analyze how the orders issued by the regime attempted to protect the "integrity of the Italian race." For the first time, documents from the Vatican archives illuminate how the Catholic Church dealt with issues related to homosexuality during the Fascist period in Italy.