Are Italians brown? Categorical miscegenation and early twentieth century Italian Homosexuality

Rather than continuing to understand the late Victorian invention of homosexuality as a moment of singular and absolute abjection, let us consider the possibility of the homosexual as a practical, if accidental, agent of neocolonial expansion […] serviceable both to modern nation building and to transnational flows of capital.

In A Taste for Brown Bodies, Hiram Pérez challenges queer theory to interrogate the roles race and racism played in the 19^th century invention of the modern homosexual. However, rather than simply propose that race, gender, sexuality, nationhood, and class constitute «multiple axes of oppression», Pérez insists that race and sexuality are not discrete, even if intersecting, but instead «mutually constitutive operations».

In this essay, I begin to explore the “difference” of Italian homoeroticism by juxtaposing it with Pérez’s claims. My objects of analysis are works of early to mid-twentieth century travel literature in which homoeroticism is portrayed, some in which Italians travel abroad in search of sexual encounters, and one in which northern Europeans travel to Italy. In all cases, my aim will be to explore the historical and discursive co-constitution of early 20^th century homosexuality, Italian national identity, and race. In her groundbreaking work on constructions of race and gender in modern Italy, Gaia Giuliani pays particular attention to «the transit of racist scripts across different discursive domains – propaganda, cultural products, government policies, scientific knowledge, and legislation – and material power relations». In this essay, I will be concerned with travel literature as a particularly rich discursive domain for the transit of racist scripts, and one that might sometimes contradict or at least complicate other discursive domains like scientific knowledge.

Pérez’s analysis of the co-constitution of race and (homo)sexuality is indebted to Rey Chow, who proposes the term «categorical miscegenation» to indicate that modern race, national identity, and sex are for the most part «indistinguishable and undifferentiable from each other». Re-reading Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower, Ann Laura Stoler insists that it is impossible to comprehend the late 19^th century inventions of race and sexuality minus one another. Siobhan B. Somerville has argued that «questions of race – in particular the formation of notions of “whiteness” and “blackness” – must be understood as a crucial part of the history and representation of sexual formations». And, as Sharon Patricia Holland puts it, «The taxonomy of post-Enlightenment life requires that we order sexuality and racial belonging. One can think of these movements as coterminous rather than separate and distinct». All of these efforts respond to Holland’s concern that, as a discipline, queer theory risks proving incapable of interrogating historical instances of «the collusion of desire with domination and oppression».

According to Pérez, the late Victorian (white) homosexual found its conditions of possibility in a «range of mobilities, transformed or generated by industrialization (i.e., class privilege, whiteness, transportation technology, mass media, tourism)» – historical circumstances tied to so-called modernization. Crucial to the formation of this homosexual subject is what he terms «the brown body», a figure «to signal the fluidity and racial ambiguity at work in the way a gay cosmopolitan imagines an idealized primitive figure that functions both as an object of desire and as the repository of disowned projections cast temporally and spatially backward». Playing a constitutive role in «the formation of a cosmopolitan» male homosexual identity, that brown body «is alternately (or simultaneously) primitive, exotic, savage, pansexual, and abject».

This new, homosexual subject stakes his modernity on the primitiveness of his imaginary brown double:

The very notion of civilization requires a fantasized, primitive space onto which repressed desires are projected and disavowed. This idyllic space, populated by pansexual, uninhibited brown bodies – bodies without shame – promised liberation from Victorian restrictions on same-sex desire.

And while it might seem that this modern white homosexual subject is embodied exclusively in the so-called “gentleman traveler”, this emergent species also includes itinerant working-class figures (for example, sailors and cowboys) who

convey the brown body to the traveling eye of gay modernity. They do so through their legendary encounters with the primitive, by themselves embodying brownness (or modes of primitivity), and by acting as intermediaries for cosmopolitan identification.

As Pérez demonstrates, the Anglophone literature of this period is peopled by both this gentleman traveler and his itinerant working-class companion. The implications of Pérez’s formulation here is that, via their proximity to the primitive, some “white” sailors and cowboys may be, if not “brown”, then not quite as white as the gentlemen who pursued them.

John Champagne is Professor of English at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College, USA. He is the author of two novels, The Blue Lady’s Hands (1988) and When the Parrot Boy Sings (1990), and four scholarly monographs, The Ethics of Marginality (1995), Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy (2013), Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama, Caravaggio, Puccini, and Contemporary Cinema (2015), and, most recently, Queer Ventennio: Italian Fascism, Homoerotic Art, and the Nonmodern in the Modern (2019), a study of Filippo dePisis, Giovanni Comisso, and Corrado Cagli. Champagne’s essays have appeared in such journals as Modern Italy, g/s/I, College English,and boundary 2.