Between ‘Men’: Masculinities and Female (Perverse) Desire in Dacia Maraini’s Donna in Guerra

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Between ‘Men’: Masculinities and Female (Perverse) Desire in Dacia Maraini’s Donna in Guerra

Elena Dalla Torre

Saint Louis University

Representations of masculinities in Dacia Maraini’s Donna in guerra (1975) have received scarce critical attention. Against a backdrop of feminist criticism that deals with female characters and female emancipation, this article focuses on portrayals of non-dominant masculinities and on representations of perverse female desires as sites of denaturalization of the link between men and power. Drawing on recent scholarship on masculinity, on gay studies, and on theories of desire by Eve Sedgwick, Teresa De Lauretis, and Mario Mieli, I follow a two-fold direction. First, I analyse the silent economy of male desires (hustling, male entrustment) that shape non-dominant masculinities, thus showing that some men — because of class, geography and sexuality — suffer oppression in the novel. Then I argue that female perverse desire (especially lesbian desire) emerges to foreground a gender power differential, which ensures a dichotomization of female homosociality and homoeroticism, and results in the ultimate elision of lesbianism.

keywords power, non-dominant masculinity, patriarchal masculinity, female perverse desire, male homosocial desire, lesbianism.

Representations of masculinities and male desire in Dacia Maraini’s Donna in guerra (1975) have received little, if any, critical attention. Female emancipation and the critique of patriarchy and gender violence have been the core of critical interventions surrounding the novel (Lucamante, Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, Picchietti, Bellesia, Properzi Nelsen, Standen). One reason for the critical dismissal of masculinities could derive from Maraini’s known activism ‘dalla parte delle donne’ (on the side of women) and from the assumption that masculinity is only the site of power and oppression of women, and can only be the target of criticism rather than the object of deconstruction.¹ Compelling, in this respect, is Charlotte Ross’s argument that

1 See ‘Introduction’ in The Pleasure of Writing. Critical Essays on Dacia Maraini, ed. by Rodica Diaconescu- Blumenfeld and Ada Testaferri (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2002), pp. 3–20.

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critical explorations of women’s and gendered cultural production in Italian studies may run the risk of ‘silently eliding sexuality and masculinity from analyses of gender’.²

In a study on the changing patterns of twentieth century Italian masculinities, Maya Judd argues that female emancipation and feminism did not translate into social change for women only. The 1970s in Italy brought about a crisis in the fundamental link between male identity and tradition, which resulted in an unprec- edented diversification of male identities against model of masculinities enforced by Fascism.³ In his groundbreaking work, Elementi di critica omosessuale, Mario Mieli relates the rigidity of sexual categories and gestures to a new sexual culture (‘erotic communism’) in which the experience of sexuality was less constrained by the imperatives of reproduction and gender roles. Mieli foresaw in women’s journey to a renewed sexual consciousness the possibility for a different practice of sexuality where even masculinity and male desires could be less phallocentric.⁴ Feminism is therefore deeply intertwined with the emergence of masculinities as gender, and it is for this reason that an exploration of the interconnected dimensions of masculinity and sexuality in Donna in guerra is, in my view, overdue. One of the aims of this article is to demonstrate that the emergence of female desire in Donna in guerra enables the reading of alternative forms of male desire and masculinity, and fore- grounds the complex intersection between sexuality and forms of oppression to which Maraini has always been sensitive.⁵

Donna in guerra tells the story of Vannina’s escape from a loveless marriage and her coming to terms with her condition of oppression as a woman. Her friendship with bisexual Suna and her burgeoning sexual desire for teenage Orio are vehicles of Vannina’s gradual awakening. The male characters around Vannina and Suna themselves negotiate issues of sexuality and gender oppression by displaying, as Tommasina Gabriele has named it, a rather subversive sexual fluidity.⁶ Indeed, many of Maraini’s works (La donna perfetta, Storia di Piera, La bionda, la bruna e l’asino, Lettere a Marina, Un clandestino a bordo) span questions of prostitution, trans- sexuality and lesbianism, evidencing the writer’s engagement with matters of sexuality and, in turn, reflecting the cultural reconceptualization of gender and sexual

2 Charlotte Ross, ‘Critical Approaches to Gender and Sexuality in Italian Culture and Society’, Italian Studies, 65 (2010), 164–77 (p. 169).

3 Maya Judd, Gendering Men: Masculinities and Demographic Change in Contemporary Italy (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Brown University, 2010), p. 116.

4 For a discussion of ‘erotic communism’, see Mario Mieli, Elementi di Critica Omosessuale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2002). In his theoretical work, Mieli invited all individuals to explode repressive gender and sexual binaries (‘la mutilazione dell’Eros’) in order to embrace their inherent ‘transessualità’, which he intends as the ability to navigate the gender spectrum and experience sexual desire more fluidly (‘comunismo erotico’). Mieli was par- ticularly innovative for a couple of reasons. He understood that some feminists were at times too focused on discrimination against women and on sexism to consider their own inherent homophobia. In his view, some feminists reproduced hegemonic discourses by inadvertently reproducing both sexist and homophobic stances through anti-masculine positions. With his theory on ‘la donna in sé’ Mieli predated Butler’s gender performa- tivity, calling for more productive alliances based on gay and feminist common struggle against homophobia and sexism.

5 See The Pleasure of Writing, p. 3.

6 For a discussion of Suna’s and Santino’s bisexuality, see Tommasina Gabriele, ‘From Prostitution to Trans- sexuality: Gender Identity and Subversive Sexuality in Dacia Maraini’, Modern Language Notes, 117 (2002), 241–56.

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categories in the 1970s.⁷ In a 1977 interview with Ileana Montini, Maraini invoked the discovery of a ‘gioia di vivere’, brought about by the conquest of women’s rights, as an ethos of life and an experience of the body capable of overcoming heterosexist categories, recalling Mario Mieli’s ‘erotic communism’.⁸

As Vannina records in her diary the gradual discovery of desire, a range of secret masculine exchanges foreground a silent but disruptive economy of male desires that shape different and alternative masculinities. In Between Men, Eve Sedgwick defines desire as a masculine structure and an affective social force: ‘something less emo- tively charged, that shapes an important relationship’.⁹ Desire in Donna in guerra does weave important relationships, but not merely among men. It actually affects the construction of female bonds and femininity in ways that problematize both Sedg- wick’s idea of male homosocial desire and her unproblematic reading of a female continuum. Sedgwick notes that, for women, homoeroticism and homosociality

‘need not be pointedly dichotomized’ as they are for men, but that such a female socio-erotic continuum accounts both for the reproduction of homophobia and the reaffirmation of sexism. Sedgwick’s notion of the female continuum has been con- tested by, among others, Teresa De Lauretis in The Practice of Love.¹⁰ De Lauretis views with suspicion the tendency on the part of some feminists, starting with Adrienne Rich, to advocate a fundamental continuity between lesbian and female relations which elides the specificity of lesbian desire together with its social, cultural, and political implications. In her book, De Lauretis returns to psychoanalytic constructions of desire with the aim of rethinking lesbian sexuality. She does so by performing a rereading of Sigmund Freud’s and Michel Foucault’s narratives of sexuality via the theories of Charles S. Peirce. As she points out in ‘Habit Change’ — an essay in response to Elizabeth Grozs’s criticism of The Practice of Love — De Laureti s uses Freud’s negative theory of sexuality to claim that lesbian sexuality, like all sexuality, is inherently perverse, whereby for perversion she intends ‘not a distortion of

“nature” [. . .] but an inherent way of being of the drive itself which continuously seeks out the objects best fitted to its aim of pleasure and satisfaction’.¹¹ De Lauretis’

reformulation of desire as perverse — that is, ‘as a deviation from a socially- constituted norm’ — enables her, on the one the hand, to rethink the practice of an active female desire outside of masculinity, and, on the other, to recast sexuality as a

‘dynamic and interactive process’.¹²

Inspired by De Lauretis’s notion of perverse desire, I propose a perverse reading of gender, sexuality, and desire in Donna in guerra. I contend that desire does not exclusively belong to men in the novel, nor is masculinity assimilated only to the

7 See, for example, Maraini’s Lettere a Marina (Milan: Rizzoli, 1988) — a novel devoted to the love between two women — in which the narrator, Bianca, similarly invokes sexual and gender fluidity.

8 Ileana Montini, Parlare con Dacia Maraini (Verona: Bertani, 1997), 86–87.

9 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men. English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 2.

10 Teresa De Lauretis, The Practice of Love. Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994).

11 Teresa De Lauretis, ‘Habit Change’, in Feminism Meets Queer Theory, ed. by Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), 315–33 (p. 318).

12 De Lauretis, ‘Habit Change’, p. 320.

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oppression of women. For, as Judith Halberstam maintains in Female Masculinity,

‘if what we call “dominant masculinity” appears to be a naturalized relation between maleness and power’, alternative forms of masculinity emerge when that naturalized bond between male and power is broken, that is, when ‘masculinity leaves the white male middle-class body’.¹³ With a few exceptions, men in Donna in guerra are main- ly of a working-class environment. Class and geography are important factors in the construction of their masculinity as well as in the interplay between male and female homosocial desires in the novel. Their constant intersection determines them in unexpectedly queer ways. By queerness, I do not mean merely a position vis-à-vis one’s own sexuality, but specifically vis-à-vis patriarchal power and oppression.

Men’s unequal relation to power describes a different kind of masculinity, which becomes readable next to the emergence of female perverse desires.

Male characters in Donna in guerra are presented through the voices of the female characters and, in particular, of Suna, Vannina’s disabled friend. It is Suna who introduces us to Santino Pizzocane, with whom she strongly identifies: ‘quello che mi piace in Santino è che anche lui come me, un poco uomo e un poco donna’.¹⁴ Suna initially approaches Vannina on the premise of her own attraction to Santino, who befriends Giacinto, Vannina’s husband. The son of a fisherman and patriarch, Santino has recently lost his job as a waiter, and roams the island in search of a new job, occasionally fishing or hustling. Unlike his older brothers, Santino hardly complies with his father’s ideal of Southern manhood, based on honour and display of social power, as described by David Gilmore in Manhood and its Making.¹⁵ His father, Peppino, calls him ‘uno sfaticato, senza spina dorsale’.¹⁶ Santino’s feeble temper proves inadequate in comparison with the aggressive image of manliness that, according to Gilmore, needs to be proven publicly.¹⁷ Santino’s supposed powerless- ness indicates a preliminary shift in the relationship between men and patriarchal power. Santino is not weak; he simply does not embody power according to paternal and social expectation. bell hooks distinguishes between a patriarchal masculinity committed to the pursuit of external power and non-dominant masculinities (or feminist manhood) that somehow resists ‘absolute allegiance’ to the mandates of external power.¹⁸ Although men fitting the second model do not consciously embrace feminism as a movement, explains hooks, they can be said to display feminist char- acteristics. In that sense we may say that, by declining power, Santino rebels against patriarchy in small ways; these small rebellions, according to Halberstam, are one way in which female masculinity affirms itself and creates new gender taxonomies.¹⁹ Pizzocane’s disempowering portrayal of his son echoes the words of village matrons Tota and Giottina, who represent the generally accepted view of the young man: ‘Uno solo è riuscito storto, Santino, quello non ha voglia di lavorare, non ha voglia di fare

13 Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 2.

14 Dacia Maraini, Donna in guerra (Milan: Rizzoli, 1975), p. 40.

15 David Gilmore, Manhood in the Making (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).

16 Maraini, Donna in guerra, p. 31.

17 Gilmore, p. 32.

18 bell hooks, The Will To Change. Men, Masculinity and Love (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), p. 108.

19 Halberstam, p. 9.

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niente, scappa sempre di casa, non vuole bene a nessuno [. . .] quello finirà delin- quente’.²⁰ The adjective, ‘storto’, accounts for Santino’s deviance vis-à-vis an aggressive model of patriarchal masculinity reinforced by the Pizzocane family. ‘Storto’ is also reminiscent of the word ‘storpia’ (crippled), which Giacinto later uses to refer to Suna’s disruption of a marital order and a sexual hierarchy. In this context, Suna’s desire for Santino signifies both sexual attraction and opposition to patriarchal norms.

The gender fluidity that characterizes Suna’s self-definition and Santino’s portrayal of manhood can also be applied to their sexual exchange. They both engage in erotic practices that are eccentric to the heterosexual model of Giacinto’s and Vannina’s couple. For instance, since Suna’s attraction to Santino is not reciprocated, she finds an outlet to her desires for Santino by ‘sharing’ him with Mafalda, a mem- ber of the Marxist group to which the three belong. This erotic triangle may also be seen as a form of prostitution for Santino, who takes advantage of Suna’s wealth without loving her. However, by playing the role of ‘sugar daddy’, Suna reverses traditional gender dynamics, in which the woman receives money in exchange for giving pleasure. While Suna is somehow masculinized, Santino’s masculinity is here feminized by virtue of this exchange. Whereas Tommasina Gabriele considers Suna’s sexual fluidity a bisexuality that escapes the imposition of rigid categories of sexuality,²¹ I read Suna’s sexual fluidity also in terms of Mario Mieli’s ‘transessualità’.

‘Transessualità’ is the embodied form of ‘erotic communism’: an erotic disposition which can only emerge if and when every individual is emancipated from the repression of the inner homoerotic drive (‘mutilazione dell’eros’, as Mieli calls it).²²

Suna’s ‘transessualità’ reveals simultaneously the interrelated dimensions of gender, class, and sexual oppression. Although Suna is wealthy, she is financially dependent on her father due to her disability. Her father controls the family wealth just as Pizzocane does in his family. Therefore, while Santino is forced to sell pleasure to women and men due to lack of financial means, Suna finds herself forced to buy pleasure from Santino due to gender and disability. Suna’s ‘trans-sexual identifica- tion’ as half-woman–half-man serves to evidence her own condition of oppressed woman vis-à-vis her ‘padre-padrone’, but also Santino’s own social disadvantage before patriarchy. Santino’s masculinity symbolically refers to ‘uneven distributions of wealth’,²³ to borrow Halberstam’s expression, and reminds us that Santino is not considered by his father and his brothers worthy of inheritance and social privilege.

Only in this sense are we able to read the image of the ‘mezzo uomo mezza donna’

as a queer image, describing simultaneously a form of gender oppression and a relationship to power.

21 Gabriele, p. 246.

22 For an understanding of Mieli’s notion of ‘transessualità’, see his Elementi di critica omosessuale: ‘Io chiamerò transessualità la disposizione erotica polimorfa e “indifferenziata” infantile, che la società reprime e che, nella vita adulta, ogni essere umano reca in sé allo stato di latenza oppure confinata negli abissi dell’inconscio sotto il giogo della rimozione. Il termine “transessualità” mi sembra il più adatto a esprimere a un tempo, la pluralità delle tendenze dell’Eros e l’ermafroditismo originario e profondo di ogni individuo’ (p. 19; italics added).

23 Halberstam, p. 2.

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Other relationships in the novel disclose and highlight power differentials. On the island of Addis, fishing and hustling provide income for young male locals who practice both heterosexual and homosexual hustling. Giacinto and Santino spend considerable time fishing, which may be conceived of as queer time in its being a temporal suspension of Giacinto’s marital time (repro-normative time) and a time for cultivating pleasurable desires. Fishing also acquires a socio-symbolic value, as we see in the following passage:

Giacinto tratta Santino come un bambino. Gli insegna a usare il fucile, la maschera, le pinne; gli pela i pomodori, gli pulisce il pesce. Santino non si offende; neanche quando Giacinto gli dice che è un ignorante. Sorride, incassa la testa nelle spalle con un gesto contrito e dolce. Beve il vino a piccolo sorsi e quando manda giù un sorso più grosso, si porta la mano alla gola strizzandogli occhi. Non parla quasi mai. Mangia lentamente portandosi il cibo alla bocca con movimenti delicati e calmi.²⁴

Giacinto’s caring attitude towards Santino contrasts with the unloving behavior of Giacinto towards Vannina and with Santino’s father’s uncaring attitude. The nurturing nature of the men’s bond is therefore socio-symbolic in that it shows how male homosociality may reinforce men’s sense of self, as affidamento (entrustment) did for women and feminists in the 1970s and 1980s in Italy.²⁵ As Teresa De Lauretis points out in her introduction to the English translation of Non credere di avere diritti, entrustment implied a certain power differential among women, which was eventu- ally detrimental to them.²⁶ Yet that form of entrustment based on power disparity may be useful for reading masculine bonding and the construction of masculinity in Donna in Guerra. This kind of nurtured and nurturing masculinity resists and also silently coexists next to the violent display of virility on the part of Santino’s brothers, who go around the island sexually harassing female tourists. However, Santino’s disconnection with his brothers and his silence regarding their deeds may serve as an act of resistance to his brothers’ gender violence as well as an act of complicity with Giacinto’s more domesticated masculinity.

Male bonds and masculinity can be read alongside women’s desire and as a critique of heteronormativity. While Santino remains cold to Suna’s approaches (‘Santino non si innamora affatto’),²⁷ Giacinto repeatedly fails to satisfy Vannina in hasty sexual encounters (‘Abbiamo fatto l’amore. In fretta, come al solito, senza darmi il tempo di arrivare in fondo’.).²⁸ These bonds describe heterosexual relations as a lack of contact or a failed encounter in which the male partners appear distant and uncaring.

25 For a discussion of affidamento as feminist practice dear to the Diotima group and the Milan Women’s Book- store, and involving a woman of lower economic and educational status and another woman of higher status, see Teresa De Lauretis, ‘The Practice of Sexual Difference and Feminist Thought in Italy’, in Sexual Difference.

A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice, trans. by Patrizia Cicogna, Teresa De Lauretis (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 1–21 (p. 9). This nurturing relationship, which draws from the theory and the practice of sexual difference, functions, in the words of Teresa De Lauretis, as ‘“figure of symbolic mediation”

between women and the world’.

26 De Lauretis, in Sexual Difference, pp. 8–9.

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This is further nuanced by an episode that Vannina records in her diary, which provides a silent commentary to Giacinto’s masculinity. While she and her husband are having a walk, Giacinto lingers before a shop window, attracted to its queer allure:

Giacinto si è fermato un momento davanti al Pussy Pussy Bang Bang. Degli slips a fiori rosa svolazzavano sull’albero di una nave di cartone, a mo’ di vela. I due proprietari stavano dietro la vetrina, malinconici, vestiti con eleganza, bene abbronzati, ben pettinati, a guardare la strada vuota.²⁹

In this passage, the pink flowery underwear fluttering like a sail and the two men ‘tastefully dressed, perfectly suntanned’³⁰ behind the window evoke a feminized image of masculinity. Giacinto’s silent and fleeting participation (‘si è fermato un momento’) in this scenario may be an invitation to read his masculinity against and in relation to this queer image of masculinity.

The silence that characterizes Santino’s and Giacinto’s masculinity is germane to the secrecy that surrounds homosexual hustling. Among the hustlers are Santino and his brothers, as we find out from the confession that Orio, Santino’s teenage brother, makes to Vannina. Orio’s confession discloses the presence of an extensive male homosexual practice otherwise silenced.³¹ In Maraini’s novel, the young brothers of the Pizzocane clan turn to prostitution to make up for unemployment in the area and the lack of financial support from their father. Male homosexual hustling is also a clandestine activity, as opposed to that of the ‘belli’, who flaunt their bodies for women in the village main square. The income from homoerotic prostitution remains secret because it provides money to the unemployed youth of the island and represents an outlet for gay men belonging to privileged milieux.

Northern European men, explains Derek Duncan, ‘were lured to the peninsula by the promise of homoerotic delight’.³² Duncan’s reading aligns with the ‘paradigm of homosexual desire’ that economic historian Robert Aldrich describes in The Seduc- tion of the Mediterranean.³³ Even before the nineteenth century, Northern European men were drawn to the South of Europe in search of male companionship and sex, or in order to escape homophobic persecution, explains Aldrich.³⁴ Up to the 1960s, the Italian Mediterranean was a space for discreet sexual liberation, and the Mediter- ranean youths were at once commodified and exoticized in the minds of visitors. As the Italian economy changed, so did the encounters between visitors and Italians, which ‘assumed the form of more recognizable hustling and prostitution’.³⁵

Maraini’s portrayal of the relationships between tourists and local youth is not romanticized or exoticized. An economic dimension characterizes their sexual

30 Dacia Maraini, Woman at War, trans. by Mara Benetti and Elspeth Spottiswood (New York: Italica, 1988), p. 43.

31 Orio’s story is reminiscent of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Ragazzi di Vita (Milan: Rizzoli, 1955), which recounts the adventures of Riccetto and his gang from the outskirts of Rome. These young men who do not have jobs survive on minor tricks, thefts, and prostitution.

32 Derek Duncan, Reading and Writing Italian Homosexuality: A Case of Possible Difference (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006), p. 3.

33 Robert Aldrich, The Seduction of the Mediterranean (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 4.

34 See Aldrich, p. 1.

35 Duncan, p. 185.

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contact, and turns it into a sexual contract. In Donna in guerra, Orio talks about his experience with Hans, an older German man who likes paying boys or young men for sex, as follows:

Quando veniva a scuola, mica veniva sempre, aveva paura dei miei fratelli che se lo vedevano, lo stangavano, ma anche loro pure l’avevano fatto però con lui.

— Che cosa?

— Farsi toccare il pesce a pagamento, Gigi gliel’ha pure messo di dietro però a isso gli piacciono i ragazzini piccoli e quando crescono non li guarda manco più’ lo chiamano

‘ricchionaccio’, gli buttano le pietre addosso, ma quando uno ha bisogno di soldi ci va.³⁶

Hans buys from the youths the pleasure he seeks in a form of prostitution that Mario Mieli eloquently recalls as an inter-class exchange, which produces some specific queerly gendered embodiments. Gigi, one of the Pizzocane brothers, embodies the maschio doppio, a man who publicly passes as straight, but who engages in homosexual prostitution. Maraini’s Gigi is a sottoproletario and a maschio doppio whose sexual activity is both a form of sexual diversion and one of the ways in which subaltern men make their living. Although the maschio doppio engages in lucrative homoerotic activities, he does not identify at all as a homosexual, explains Mieli. In the prostitution activity of the maschio doppio, the economic component displaces and covers homoerotic desire.³⁷

In Donna in guerra, homophobic violence is used by the hustlers who insult and throw stones at Hans in order to draw sexual boundaries and reinforce their normative masculinity. Gigi’s way of prostituting puts the hustler into a masculine position

— the penetrator — while placing Hans, who likes being penetrated, in the feminine one. Playing the ‘feminine’ is more lucrative, a reason some hustlers, like Orio or Santino, accept this role. This causes the brothers to tease Orio about his presumed lack of virility, and coerce him into having intercourse with a German female tourist so that he can prove he is a ‘real’ man. As Orio cannot get an erection, his brothers mock him for ‘a lack of virility’, for which, he, just like Santino, is degradingly aligned with his mother and feminized by his father. As in hooks’ description of patriarchal masculinity, the father of the Pizzocane family values only the sons who perform masculinity as ‘the superior rights of male to dominate, be their subordinate female or any group deemed weaker’.³⁸ He even comes to praise them when they rape a wealthy woman bathing in the sea. The performance of masculinity of the Pizzocane brothers is rooted in the social and economic castration that characterizes, in Mieli’s

37 Mieli writes: ‘Si tratta dei “maschi doppi” e di tutti quegli eterosessuali di sesso maschile che, malgrado affermino costantemente la loro eterosessualità, hanno piuttosto di frequente o addirittura in continuazione rapporti omosessuali. Molti di questi maschi vivono ai margini del “mondo” omosessuale in senso stretto, di cui divengono e — spesso — i boia: sono le “marchette”, i “ragazzi di vita”, ovvero tutti i giovani proletari che si prostituiscono ai gay e che i giornalisti del capitale (e delle sinistre del capitale, soprattutto) chiamano oggi “sottoproletari”, per evitare di riconoscere nelle loro azioni e nel loro “stile di vita” un’espressione specifica del proletariato soggiogato dal sistema [. . .]. Il sistema li frega doppiamente: infatti, oltre a castrarli fin dalla nascita economicamente e socialmente, dà loro gratificazioni palliative legate al privilegio fallico, gratificazioni che li inducono a comportarsi in modo funzionale al dominio del capitale’ (p. 164).

38 hooks, p. 114.

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view, subaltern men (‘sottoproletari’). Mieli explains that this group of men tends to direct the anger originated in their socio-economic disadvantage against women and homosexuals by making them appear inferior or feminized.³⁹ The woman’s rape and the aggression of Hans can be thus read as forms of gender oppression which show the intertwined dimension of sexism and homophobia in the novel. Orio’s confession to Vannina assumes a political purpose: it uses the hidden world of male homoeroticism and male prostitution to disclose and denounce socio-economic disadvantage and the problematic relation between men and power in Southern Italy.

The secrecy that surrounds Vannina’s encounters with Orio is of a different kind.

Vannina meets him during a dinner at Santino’s house, and from that moment on she feels attracted to this boy who is not quite yet a man. Orio is a solitary teenager who dislikes school and tries to earn some money by selling old comics and, as noted above, through prostitution. He is sick with a disease that doctors cannot name, an element that adds to the mysterious allure of the character, but also to the socio- economic commentary of novel. When Vannina accidentally comes across Orio on the street and the boy offers to help with her groceries, the occasion becomes the pretext for a seduction, in which Vannina takes the lead. On this occasion, Vannina shows a different side of herself, that of an active seducer, a quality that is in striking contrast to her submissive sexual attitude with Giacinto: ‘L’ho preso per mano e l’ho portato dietro la tenda, sul letto [. . .] L’ho spogliato. Gli ho fatto saltare con un colpo il berretto di lana blu. Gli ho sfibbiato la cintura dalle grosse borchie d’oro’.⁴⁰ Orio makes no attempt to resist Vannina’s seduction and instead lets himself be led by Vannina’s expert hands.

The encounters that constitute the sporadic but intense relationship of Orio and Vannina could be easily identified as heterosexual. I would, however, be cautious about qualifying Orio’s and Vanina’s bond as strictly heterosexual. It seems to me that De Lauretis’s definition of perverse desire aptly describes the non-normatively heterosexual bond between the teenager and the more mature Vannina, who disrupt the sexual order and a sexual hierarchy by ‘coming of age’ together, sexually speak- ing. Understanding perversion as ‘a deviation of the sexual drive from the path lead- ing to the reproductive object’, De Lauretis contends that ‘perverse desire might be usefully considered in relation to [. . .] forms of sexuality that appear to be heterosexual but are not so in the normative or reproductive way’.⁴¹ Expanding on her idea of perverse desire, I argue not only that Vannina’s and Orio’s bond is a perversion of heterosexuality, but also that Vannina’s desire is a perverse (and feminine) re-reading of Hans’ seduction of Orio. The object of seduction in both cases, Orio takes the passive position, while Vannina occupies the active position. This position grants her the sexual agency and the pleasure denied to her within marriage. The sexual contigu- ity between male pederasty and female pederasty lies in that they are both perverse desires, otherwise censored or silenced. As such, they read as mutually constructed.

Although Vannina’s sexual agency is inscribed against a background of queer masculine desires, there exists a substantial difference between Vannina’s perverse

39 Mieli, p. 164.

41 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. xiii.

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bond and Hans’ pederasty. The episode of Orio’s seduction takes place in Vannina’s house when Vannina is aware that Giacinto may show up at any minute. Upon his return, Vannina confronts her husband about the nature of their love, pointing out the inadequacies of their marriage and revealing the dysfunctional character of the marital couple. Unable to defend himself against Vannina’s ‘truth’, Giacinto hits her, using violence to reinforce his threatened authority. Giacinto’s reaction shows that Vannina has struck a chord. Although he comes back to hug her, his aggressive reaction shows that Vannina’s revelation has somehow destabilized his assumptions about marriage and his position as husband and as a figure of family authority. By breaking the silence of marriage through her active seduction, Vannina underscores and challenges the power differential between husband and wife, a power differential that is reinscribed in all-masculine terms when Orio’s brothers deride Orio’s passive tendency with the German man. The narrative continuity between the two highlights the power differential that also exists between men, placing some on top (Pizzocane’s father and brothers) and others underneath (Santino, Orio, Hans). It is this power differential that links sexism to homophobia in the novel.

In Between Men, Sedgwick warns her readers not to confuse feminism and antiho- mophobia, but to engage analytically with the relationship between them.⁴² This warning echoes Mieli’s call to feminists to overcome sexism and homophobia in favour of a ‘trans-alliance’ based on a productive recognition of a larger gender and sexual spectrum. In this respect, Donna in guerra partly performs such an alliance and nuances it with more pressing questions of power inequality, exploitation, and violence. The bonds between characters just explored (Santino/Giacinto, Hans/Orio, Orio/Vannina, Santino/Suna) allow us to see that the idea of a continuum between homosociality and homoeroticism is not more specific to one gender (women) than another (men) in the novel. Male and female homosocial desires often intersect, revealing how both men and women in the novel are the subjects of power inequality.

My suggestion to put the two dimensions within a continuum does not mean that the two are equal or identical. Postulating the ‘historically differential shapes’ of male and female homosociality, Sedgwick argues that there ‘will always be articulations and mechanisms of the enduring inequality of power between women and men’.⁴³ Such inequality is confirmed in the novel when Giacinto imposes himself on Vannina by limiting her autonomy (i.e. her friendship with Suna, her involvement in the Marx- ist movement), dismissing her right to pleasure (i.e. their hasty sexual encounters, her relationship with Orio), and demanding that she be a mother.

Acknowledging that power inequality is present among men as well lets us see that homophobia is at play as much as misogyny and that homophobia is actually a misogynist structure, to agree with Sedgwick. The power asymmetry based on gender describes the very structure of male bonds and places some below others in social, economic, and sexual terms (Santino and Orio vs. fathers and brothers; hustlers vs.

Hans).

42 Sedgwick, p. 20.

43 Sedgwick, p. 5.

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This power differential is one that Vannina exposes and denounces when a group of young boys in her classroom immobilize a female schoolmate as they mime a scene of rape. The children reproduce attitudes that they have witnessed and that are cul- turally embedded, as the novel suggests in the sexual assault that Orio’s brothers carry out. The response of the victim’s reaction to the assault (‘sorridente e compi- aciuta’) proves the extent to which certain gendered behaviours are unconsciously encoded and taken as normal, something we have seen at play in Vannina’s attitudes.⁴⁴ Calm, but determined, Vannina explains the meaning of the word ‘stupro’

(rape) and ask the girls in the class to explain the passivity of Maria Stella and the other female schoolmates vis-à-vis the male assault: ‘Non sarà perché pensano che i maschi hanno diritto di fare queste cose?’.⁴⁵ The girls answer that this is the way boys do things with girls sexually: the former always dominate and the latter are subdued (‘la femmina fa la donna e sta sotto, il maschio fa l’omo e sta sopra’) in an interplay that presents heterosexuality as masculine domination and feminine oppression.⁴⁶ Vannina, instead, highlights the importance of making love as opposed to sexual domination: ‘L’amore è una cosa che si fa in due, con dolcezza, con tenerezza, senza prepotenze e tutti e due devono essere contenti’.⁴⁷ Vannina’s pedagogy of love adds a nuance to her practice of love with Orio: Vannina’s love for Orio opposes the violent lessons of his brothers on sex and virility.

Vannina’s relation to Orio is similar to Suna’s and Vannina’s in terms of its nurturing effect and its political value. The women’s bond also shares an element of perverse desire that has a politically disruptive force. Having served a Marxist group (‘Vittoria Proletaria’) with Vannina and Santino, Suna is confronted with the misogynist and homophobic attacks of the group’s members and its leader when her closeted relation with Mafalda is uncovered. She is expelled from the group on the premise of her lesbianism, and decides to affirm the power of love in a letter to Vannina right before committing suicide:

Le donne, ecco a cosa penso tutto il tempo. Io delle donne mi innamoro sempre di più, vorrei baciarle tutte, con amore, nelle loro pieghe di grasso, nelle loro rughe sudate, nei loro culi disfatti, nelle fiche rovinate, negli occhi allucinati, nelle bocche sgangherate, dappertutto dove viene offesa e lapidata, per il trionfo del cazzo padrone.⁴⁸

In this letter Suna forcefully reclaims lesbianism both as a particular desire for women (private) and a call for love of the oppressed (public). As in Vannina’s lesson, her language of love stands against the phallic language of abuse (‘culi disfatti, fiche rovinate, occhi allucinati, bocche sgangherate’) which the Marxist movement endors- es by dismissing it. Suna situates the emergence of her own lesbian desire within a larger and politicized context of female solidarity. However, Suna does not elide her own desire behind that idea of ‘female continuum’ as it occurs in Sedgwick’s discussion of experiences of sisterhood, female friendship, and the mother-daughter theme.⁴⁹

47 Maraini, Donna in guerra, pp. 257–58.

49 Sedgwick, p. 2.

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Yet because of that desire made public, Suna is considered socially unfit, and her suicide marks her a social outcast as a woman and a lesbian. Opposite to Sedgwick’s contention that female homosociality and homoeroticism are less dichotomized than male homosociality and homoeroticism, it appears that male homosociality and homoeroticism are necessarily contiguous in the novel and their coexistence is reinforced through silenced gender oppression (sexist and homophobic), and the elision of lesbianism. As far as the latter is concerned, we may notice it in Giacinto’s fear of Vannina’s and Suna’s complicity, in Mafalda’s fear of lesbianism and rejection of Suna, and in Suna’s ultimate expulsion from the group.

Although the possibility of lesbianism is precluded, lesbian desire remains in the form of a dream that seals Vannina’s recovery after her abortion:

Volevo baciarla per ringraziarla [. . .]. Mi sono chinata, ma al posto della sua faccia ho trovato il suo sesso: una conchiglia bianca di marmo all’interno rosso, palpitante. Dalla conchiglia sgorgava un fiotto di latte dolcissimo. Ho accostato le labbra; ho bevuto di quel latte che sapeva di alghe marine e bevendo sentivo che mi riempivo di forza, di coraggio.⁵⁰

This remarkable image presents cunnilingus as a nourishing act that reinvigorates Vannina’s body, and a fantasy of reconciliation between two women as a newly found female subjectivity. In The Practice of Love, De Lauretis draws on the fantasy of origins outlined by Laplanche and Pontalis to describe the seduction of the homosexual-maternal metaphor as the scenario in which lesbian desire and subjectivity can be articulated as the encounter between the two.⁵¹ In Vannina’s dream, the encounter of the two takes place through an image of nurturing that is displaced from the breasts (traditional site of maternal nurture) to the vulva (queer site of sexual nurture). This displaced image becomes the very staging for a queer female desire that has been socially disavowed. The women’s embrace, with the image of milk flowing from Suna’s sexual organ, marks the rebirth of the female body to a space of sexual fluidity which carries social, political, and sexual meanings. Closer to Mieli’s

‘transessualità’ and to De Lauretis’ perverse desire, this sexual fluidity, prefigured by Vannina’s dream, is a dynamic process that provides us with a context for re-reading desire as a force shaping masculinities and femininities alike, and highlighting power inequalities that affect not only the novel’s women but also its men.

51 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 92. She refers to Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, ‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality’, in Formations of Fantasy, ed. by Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 19–26.