In The Name of Transparency: Gender, Terrorism, and Masonic Conspiracies in Italy

In 1993 Italian newspapers published the membership lists of all major Masonic Orders in the country. The lists were part of an ongoing campaign waged in the name of transparency against the secrecy of Freemasons, long suspected of political conspiracies. The lists, however, omitted women’s names, thus reifying Freemasonry as a brotherhood of men. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork among Freemason men and women in Italy, I examine historically and ethnographically the significance of women’s absence from the lists, the aftermath of those publications for Masonic experiences in Italy, and the paradoxes of transparency as a gendered discourse.