Italian Medical and Literary Discourses around Female Same-Sex Desire, 1877–1906

Abstract

There is a widespread view that desire between women has historically been virtually absent or at least invisible in Italian culture; this has been compounded by the persistent taboos surrounding lesbianism in Italy and the absence of sustained critical debate on the subject.1 However, scholars are now beginning to explore the issue, excavating silenced histories, unearthing tales of discrimination, abuse and sexual subterfuge, and revealing the presence of a public discourse on desire between women in post-unification Italy, particularly in scientific publications.2 Indeed, as Chiara Beccalossi argues in her study on female same-sex inversion in Italy and Great Britain, far from being a taboo subject, by the 1890s female same-sex practices had become quite a ‘fashionable’ topic in Italian medical and psychiatric journals.3 This chapter builds on such studies to suggest that in addition to being rather a popular theme in Italian positivist science of the period, the question of desire between women was attracting attention in several different fields, producing a variety of discourses that circulated across textual genres, from science to literature, including both more mainstream novels and erotica. As I will show below, these discourses ranged from outright condemnations of female homoerotic desire and non- normative embodiments of sex and gender, to voyeuristic depictions of sexual intimacy between women and to more or less overt endorsements of ‘Sapphic’ love.