Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy

1 Rhetorics of Virility: D'Annunzio, Marinetti, Mussolini, Benjamin

1 / Rhetorics of Virility: D'Annunzio, Marinetti, Mussolini, Benjamin Virilities Dacche tutto era, allora, maschio e Mavorte: e insino le femine e le balie e le poppe della tu' balia, e Fovario e le trombe di Falloppio e la vagina e la vulva. La virile vulva della donna italiana.1 [For everything then was male and Martial: even broads and wet nurses, and the tits of your wet nurse and the ovary and the fallopian tubes and the vagina and the vulva. The virile vulva of the Italian woman.] Thus Carlo Emilio Gadda maliciously summarizes the fascist era in his novel Eros e Priapo (Eros and Priapo), by carrying the obsession with virility in fas­ cist discourse to its limit: the virilizadon of woman herself. Gadda's aim is to ridicule fascist discourse by pointing to what he takes to be the absurdity of mixing and matching gender and sex: so outlandish is the fascist rhetoric of virility, his logic goes, that it even extended virility to women's genitalia! But such a gendering is ridiculous only if one assumes a naturalized rela­ tion between gender and sex, in which masculinity is the natural property of the male and femininity the natural property of the female, and only if one assumes that virility can be detached neither from masculinity nor from the male. I would like to begin by putting into question such assumptions and suggesting that we cannot assume that we know what interpretants to assign to such a highly charged term as "virility," even before we move on Unless noted otherwise, all translations throughout the book are my own. 1 2 / Rhetorics of Virility to its more properly rhetorical use in fascist discourse. If some of the dis­ courses we are about to examine will often subscribe to those assumptions, indeed will sometimes vehemently enforce them, others may line up in­ stead on the side of the possibility of mixing and matching. We cannot therefore assume that "virile" is equivalent to "phallic" or to "masculine," that its contrary is "effeminate," nor that the term occupies the same area in English as in Italian. In English, according to the OED, "virility" may refer to "the period of life during which a person of the male sex is in full vigour, mature or fully developed manhood or masculine force"; it may refer specifically to the "generative organs" or to capacity for sexual inter­ course; it may refer to "manly strength and vigour of action or thought, energy or force or a virile character." As an adjective, "virile" may refer simply to a stage in life in contrast to youth and old age; in Renaissance usage, it may be applied to a woman to mean "nubile"; it may be defined, broadly, as "of, belonging to, or characteristic of man; manly, masculine, marked by strength or force." Zingarelli's Italian dictionary is even more loquacious on the topic, offering as examples of "that which is proper to man, as male," a list of nouns that might be described by the word "vir­ ile": "sex, appearance, beauty, nature, member." And as qualities that are "proper to the physically and mature adult male," the following examples appear: "force, voice, age, energy, wisdom, courage." In Italian the no­ tion of virility appears to have undergone further cultural elaboration and may refer to "that which is proper or suitable to the strong, well­balanced, and self­confident person, aware of his role, duties, responsibilities, etc." Because the gender of possessive adjectives in Italian refers not to the pos­ sessor but to the thing possessed, this last definition appears unmarked by gender in much the same way as "man" in English functions as the uni­ versalized, "unmarked" term. These definitions are simply the raw material, the semantic field, that fascism will mine in both senses of the word: all possibilities will be excavated and explosive devices planted where one least expects them. Yet even this elementary reading of dictionaries is illuminating. Zeev Sternhell, for example, lists virility as one of many qualities and cults that characterize the "new civilization" desired by fascism, yet those cults in fact read like dictionary entries for a single master term.2 As mentioned in the preface, these cults — of youth, duty, sacrifice, strength, obedience, sex­ uality, war, and so on — all are inflections of the term "virility." Indeed, Mussolini's public image appears to be similarly dictated by a series of dic­ tionary entries. In Philip Cannistraro's account of the...