General perspective on sexuality in modern Italy

Adoro las notas al pie que en realidad son miniensayos bibliográficos; verbigracia, la nota 4 de Mauro Pasqualini en From the Sexual Question to the Praise of Prostitution: Modernism and Sexual Politics in Florence, 1908–1914, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 21, No. 3, September 2012.

For a general perspective on sexuality in modern Italy, see Wanrooij, Storia del pudore; his “Italy: Sexuality, Morality and Public Authority,” in Sexual Cultures in Europe: National Histories, ed. Franz X. Eder, Lesley Hall, and Gert Hekma (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 114–37; and his “The History of Sexuality in Italy (1860–1945),” in Gender, Family and Sexuality: The Private Sphere in Italy, 1860–1945, ed. Perry Wilson (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 177–88. For prostitution in Italy since the mid-nineteenth century, see Mary Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999). For the most recent studies on the works of Mantegazza and Lombroso and their impact, see Mary Gibson, Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002); Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson, introduction to Criminal Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman by Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and Luisa Tasca, “Il ‘senatore erotico’: Sesso e matrimonio nel’antropologia di Paolo Mantegazza,” in La mediazione matrimoniale: Il terzo (in)comodo in Europa fra Otto e Novecento, ed. Bruno Wanrooij (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2004), 295–320. Italian sexologists’ early interest in female same-sex desire has been studied by Chiara Beccalossi, “The Origin of Italian Sexological Studies: Female Sexual Inversion, ca. 1870–1900,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18, no. 1 (2009): 103–20. A more general analysis of Italian scientists and their approach to women and female sexuality may be found in V. P. Babini, A. Tagliavinni, and F. Minuz, La donna nelle scienze dell’uomo: Imaggini del feminile nella cultura scientifica italiana di fine secolo (Milan: F. Angeli, 1986). The construction of notions of masculinity in connection with the process of nation building since the mid-nineteenth century as well as the corresponding responses to homosexuality are analyzed in Lorenzo Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo: L’omosessualità nell esperimento totalitatio fascista (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2005), especially chapters 1 and 2. Anxieties among liberal Italy’s educators about urbanization and its effects on morality as well as their interest in divulging sexual education have been described in Bonetta, Corpo e nazione, 321–450; and Giorgio Rifelli and Corrado Ziglio, Per una storia dell’educazione sessuale, 1870–1920 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1991). For the origins of the Italian feminist movement, see Annarita Buttafuoco, Questioni di cittadinanza: Donne e diritti sociali nell’Italia liberale (Siena: Protagon, 1997); and Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), especially chapter 2 for the relationship between women and the liberal state. Issues concerning the regulation of prostitution and its connection to syphilis are studied by Giorgio Gattei, “La sifilide: Medici e poliziotti intorno alla ‘venere politica,’” in Storia d’Italia, Annali 7: Malattia e medicina, ed. Franco Della Peruta (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), 741–98.