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Paper Short Abstract:

Whilst key in the reproduction of the bourgeois and Catholic order, women selling sex in Italy have been consistently stigmatized for their work. In this presentation, I discuss what the contemporary nostalgia for the brothel means at a time when women visibly selling sex are prevalently migrants.

Paper Abstract:

In this presentation I discuss the role of female-to-male prostitution in Italy’s moral and political economy of sexuality. State-organized female prostitution was a key pillar in the scaffolding of the country’s ‘national heterosexuality’ (Berlant and Warner 1998); it lay at the heart of its national and imperial project, and it lasted for almost a century, surviving intact major political upheavals – including two World Wars, fascism, its collapse, the end of the Kingdom and the birth of the Republic. Albeit key for the preservation of the bourgeois and Catholic order through the cultivation of male heterosexual dispositions, women selling sex were direly stigmatized for their work, overall being structurally positioned as a gendered class of ‘abjects’ (McClintock 1995). As sex workers denounced, this ambivalence did not stop after brothels were shut down (Comitato per i diritti civili delle prostitute 1983). As women’s autonomous negotiation power over the exchange value of their labour undermined the organized availability of heterosexual sex on male demand, brothels became mythological objects, celebrated in a range of cultural productions (Serughetti 2019). Around the end of the XX century, women visibly selling sex on the street were almost exclusively migrants, and the reopening of case chiuse (‘tolerance’ houses) made its way into right-wing parties’ political agendas (Crowhurst 2019). Against this background and drawing from my ethnographic research (Zambelli 2023), in this presentation I discuss the meaning of the peculiar nostalgia for the patriarchal and capitalist institution of the brothel circulating in present-day Italy.