Love's ethics: Sibilla Aleramo and queer feminism in fin de siecle Italy
Item
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Title
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Love's ethics: Sibilla Aleramo and queer feminism in fin de siecle Italy
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:3db66f1bb74d:11620
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identifier
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12139
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Creator
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Zitani, Ellen,
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Contributor
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Mary Gibson | Randolph Trumbach
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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European history | LGBTQ studies | Gender studies | Womens studies | Biographies | Feminism | Lina Poletti | Queer | Sexology | Sexual Ethics | Sibilla Aleramo
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Abstract
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Utilizing the love story of feminists Sibilla Aleramo and Lina Poletti as a case study, this work illustrates lesbianism's complicated intersection with the public discourses of sexology, feminism and sexual ethics in fin de siecle Italy. While both Aleramo (famous for her 1906 feminist anthem, Una donna) and Poletti (a lesser-known scholar and activist) served on the frontlines of the Italian women's emancipation movement, their private lives lingered on the far periphery of acceptable sexual practices in recently-unified Italy. This dissertation looks at the public and private discourses surrounding the topic of women's homosexuality, love and polyamory in Italy in order to demonstrate how same-sex attraction, gender-nonconformity, feminism, and sexual ethics were understood and articulated by early-twentieth-century Italians. Italian public discourse by medical, criminological and social researchers categorized lesbianism as a disease, a sign or result of gender-nonconformity and sometimes criminality, or as a foreign plague infecting Italy's feminists. In contrast, Aleramo all but rejected the ideas of the sexologists and instead relied on the discourses of feminism and sexual ethics to inform her ideas on gender-nonconformity, homosexuality and monogamy. For her, homosexuality was not an identity or a disease. She saw love as feminist and debated sexual ethics in order to develop a new sexual space for herself and all Italian women, hetero- and homosexual.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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History
