European Homonationalism & Italian Regionalism: The Production of Gender and Sexually Non-Conforming Subjectivities at Europe’s Southern Borders

Abstract

This research project addresses the topics of queer migration, belonging, and citizenship with a particular focus on Italy and its oscillating role between North and South, both due its geographical location on the European Union’s external border and also because of its internal regionalism and North-South divide.

Questions and topics

People flee from their homes for different reasons, among them racism and persecution because of their ethnicity, or discrimination and violence because of their sexuality or their gender expression. Due to its geographical position, Italy has the highest number of refugee arrivals in Europe. From representing a safe haven and constituting a destination to flee to for some people, to a place of unfavorable conditions to flee from for others—these changing roles that Italy assumes have shaped discourses about migration, citizenship, and the body. Taking its cue from Balibar, this research project is looking at Italy as borderland, arguing that with its multi-layered border situation Italy provides a productive ground for analyzing/theorizing the role of the border (crossings) in shaping the self and the body as it happens in processes of de- and reterritorialization (cf. Fellner & Nossem 2018; forthcoming). Colpani analyzes the “Europeanness of homonationalism” in the Italian context, where “the national space is defined in terms of heterosexuality […], [and] we witness a resignification of Europe as the land of liberal sexual politics,” (2014, 33) with Europe and European judges attributed the role of rescuing Italy from its ‘backwardness’ (ibid). In this project, a series of case studies (e.g. blogs, FB entries, websites, statements of activist groups) are being looked at, analyzing how questions of nationalism and border making are interrelated in the production of sexual citizenship. In this context, Italy can be seen as vacillating between heading for European ‘modernity’ and struggling with internal and immigrating backwardness that “may threaten rights and freedoms not-yet achieved but ‘to come’” (Colpani 2014).

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