From the 19th century hotbed of sexual tourism to the 21st century idyllic scenario of Guadagnino's steamy romance "Call Me by Your Name," Italy has been cast globally as an imaginary site of sexual freedom. Discourses on sexuality started proliferating in the late 19th century thanks to accounts of medical doctors and anthropologists (i.e. Lombroso, Mantegazza) who wished to contain the Italian vice. Later on, due to the Fascist obsession for sexual surveillance, male homosexuals, deemed unhealthy citizens, were pathologized and sent to confinement. Yet, with the early 60s when the Kinsey's report made it to Italy along with the Italian appeal for the "dolce vita", a new sexual freedom converted "early perversions" into "pleasant diversions", and pathology into diversity. Between the early 70s and the first Rome Pride in 2000, an Italian movement of sexual activism - featuring activists, writers, and artists - have impacted and reshaped globally the ways in which we experience and talk about sex, bodies and desires nowadays. How do we think, represent, and talk sex in Italian culture? How have race and gender shifted understandings of sexuality from pathology to diversity in Italian culture and society? This course invites students to explore and analyze a number of Italian cultural productions on sexuality. The material selected includes medical accounts, sexual health articles, fictions on abortion, feminist manifestos, documentaries and movies - spanning post-Unification and Fascist Italy, post-war sex education, and 1970s queer feminist activism, 1980s AIDS reports and fiction, and the transgender movement. The class is taught in English.
Course Attributes: EN H; AS HUM; AS LCD; FA HUM; AR HUM
