As historian Peppino Ortoleva has recently shown, the closure of the whorehouses under the 1958 Merlin law was followed by a wild outburst of all forms of erotica, which in its suddenness and disorder transformed the entire Italian mediasphere into a sort of ‘brothel without walls’. Throughout the 1960s, in Italy the sexual mores evolved rapidly, and so did the representation of sex both in popular movies and in art films. Italian cinema began to deal more and more relentlessly with every kind of sexuality, the more deviant from the procreative heterosexual norm the better. As a result, homosexuality became a particularly challenging subject: conceived both as a deviation and as an attraction (also in Tom Gunning’s sense of the term), it was exploited in an unprecedented number of works. In fact, throughout the 1960s more than 150 films – both fiction movies presenting homosexual characters and documentaries showing homosexuals – were produced and released in Italy. In the effort to preserve the postwar mores, Christian Democrats politicians, censors and magistrates tried to fight back in so anxious a manner that they sometimes went so far as to deviate from the standard and legal procedures. Thanks to new and unpublished archival documents, mostly from the censorship files at Ministry of Cultural Heritage, the paper will reconstruct the negotiation which shaped this unparalleled representation of homosexuality and contributed to redefining the boundaries of what cinema was allowed to show and to defining sexual deviation itself before the foundation of the Italian gay rights movement in 1971.

Negotiating the Representation of Homosexuality in Italian Cinema Between the Merlin Law and the Foundation of the Gay Rights Movement / M. Giori. ((Intervento presentato al convegno Deviate! tenutosi a Cork nel 2014.

Negotiating the Representation of Homosexuality in Italian Cinema Between the Merlin Law and the Foundation of the Gay Rights Movement

M. Giori
Primo
2014

Abstract

As historian Peppino Ortoleva has recently shown, the closure of the whorehouses under the 1958 Merlin law was followed by a wild outburst of all forms of erotica, which in its suddenness and disorder transformed the entire Italian mediasphere into a sort of ‘brothel without walls’. Throughout the 1960s, in Italy the sexual mores evolved rapidly, and so did the representation of sex both in popular movies and in art films. Italian cinema began to deal more and more relentlessly with every kind of sexuality, the more deviant from the procreative heterosexual norm the better. As a result, homosexuality became a particularly challenging subject: conceived both as a deviation and as an attraction (also in Tom Gunning’s sense of the term), it was exploited in an unprecedented number of works. In fact, throughout the 1960s more than 150 films – both fiction movies presenting homosexual characters and documentaries showing homosexuals – were produced and released in Italy. In the effort to preserve the postwar mores, Christian Democrats politicians, censors and magistrates tried to fight back in so anxious a manner that they sometimes went so far as to deviate from the standard and legal procedures. Thanks to new and unpublished archival documents, mostly from the censorship files at Ministry of Cultural Heritage, the paper will reconstruct the negotiation which shaped this unparalleled representation of homosexuality and contributed to redefining the boundaries of what cinema was allowed to show and to defining sexual deviation itself before the foundation of the Italian gay rights movement in 1971.
4-set-2014
Settore L-ART/06 - Cinema, Fotografia e Televisione
University College Cork
Negotiating the Representation of Homosexuality in Italian Cinema Between the Merlin Law and the Foundation of the Gay Rights Movement / M. Giori. ((Intervento presentato al convegno Deviate! tenutosi a Cork nel 2014.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/2434/266132
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