Chiara Bertone

Beyond the sex machine? Sexual practices and masculinity in adult men's heterosexual accounts

The processes of reproduction and change of adult masculinities through everyday sexual practices remain largely invisible to research. Our attempt is to shed light upon these processes by investigating middle-aged Italian mens accounts of their heterosexual, sexual biographies on the basis of 36 in-depth interviews. These cohorts of men have experienced structural transformations in gender relations and changes in the cultural scenarios regarding sexuality, with the emergence of new permissive and intimacy scripts. Many of them substantially neutralise these changes, reproducing a naturalised view of male sexuality, while others move towards broader understandings of sexuality, less centred upon intercourse, and, in some cases, reveal a loosening of the connection between sexuality and masculinity. In the ways these men make sense of these changes, the ongoing work of doing gender emerges as taking place within specific communities of practices.

Putting Families of Origin into the Queer Picture: Introducing This Special Issue

In undertaking our own separate research projects and in our crosscontinental comparative analyses of those projects, we became aware of the gaps between the richness of research on GLBT lives, including experiences of intimacy and parenthood, and the paucity of research on their relations with their families of origin. Still marginal is, in particular, research on the perspectives of the families of origin themselves: parents, but also siblings, grandparents, and other members of extended families. For the purposes of this special issue, we are deploying the term families of origin to mean heterosexual-identifying family members (at least as they publicly perform and display their sexualities), living within a heteronormative socio-politicocultural system. As we will argue in this introduction, however, there is a need to document and research, and thereby historically situate, family diversity, including the increasing shifting discourses and lived experiences of same-sex and other queer families of origin.

Suffering As the Path to Acceptance: Parents of Gay and Lesbian Young People Negotiating Catholicism in Italy

This article investigates the experiences of parents of gay men and lesbians (GL) as they negotiate the influential Catholic discourse on homosexuality in Italy, and their Catholic belonging and practice. The analysis is based upon in-depth interviews with 46 parents of gay and lesbian people. We explore how parents who are heavily involved in the religious community negotiate their role within it, but also how, more generally, parents frame their notions of what it means to be lesbian or gay in relation to Catholic discourse. Parents draw upon different, and often seemingly contradictory, cultural repertoires in order to combine, negotiate, or integrate what public discourse constructs as irreconcilable positions: acceptance of gay and lesbian lives and identities and Catholic belonging. The notion of the homosexual as being destined to undergo suffering provides room for acceptance of their childs sexual identity whilst preserving heteronormative assumptions. This frame constitutes an alternative to rejection, which is at odds with parents’ ideas of the family as being based on unconditional love. It also provides a bridge with therapeutic culture and narratives of liberation from suffering that inform, especially, middle-class family relations and the cultural resources available to them.

Citizenship across generations: struggles around heteronormativities

This article argues for the importance of attention to intergenerational relations in understanding the conditions for access to citizenship rights and recognition for non-heterosexual people. The case of Italy, where individual entitlements and responsibilities are largely structured around intergenerational dependence, underlines the salience of intergenerational relations in relation to sexual citizenship. Drawing on a study of the families of origin of self-identified young gay men and lesbians carried out in Italy, this article explores how access to citizenship rights and the construction of the identities that can claim recognition are mediated by processes of mutual disclosure and negotiation within families. Beyond a shared notion of family ties as defined by unconditional love, a diversity of narratives are detected, linked to differences in gender, class and family cultures. It is especially when family narratives are informed by the middle-class ideology of the democratic family as a space for the development of authentic selves that access to rights becomes conditional upon compliance with the obligations of a ‘good child’, and the conditions for the reproduction of heteronormative citizenship are set.

Queerying the Public Administration in Italy: Local Challenges to a National Standstill

Given the orientation to silence non-heterosexual experiences that informs centralised Italian legislation and policies, and following a European trend towards decentralisation, local administrations have taken on a fundamental role in LGBT policies, and developed partnerships with local LGBT organisations. Our analysis of these policies confirms the presence of a national as well as a more global trend, namely the fact that the ‘urban safety’ discourse has become a main source of legitimation for public intervention on LGBT issues, creating discursive boundaries that allow little space for a positive public representation of queer subjects and for the recognition of their agency. In looking at these boundaries, we draw upon the concept of ‘speakability’ which Cooper proposes in analysing local LGBT policies in the UK ‘to identify a cluster of normative and epistemological practices’ including ‘the urge and capacity to speak, the extent to which a topic or field renders itself utterable, what can be legitimately said, and a talent for speaking’ (2006: 928). In this chapter we show how the changes in the terms of speakability towards a discourse on ‘urban safety’1 imply a shift in the role of local administrations, from promoting rights, to meeting the needs of a victimised, normalised and individualised subject (Pitch and Ventimiglia, 2001). It also corresponds to a redefinition of the role assigned to the actors of civil society as partners of local governance: from bearers of claims, based upon conflictual political views, to shared interest groups.

Queerying families of origin

Fifteen years ago, Robert-Jay Green published a critique of the prevailing wisdom surrounding lesbians and gay men in families of origin. In this work, Green (2000) called attention to the overgeneralization of findings from studies of White, North American, upperand middle-class lesbians and gays; recruitment primarily from PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) and other groups that are likely to be uniquely accepting; and failure to analyze the social and cultural contexts in which family interactions unfold, among other theoretical and methodological issues. The trouble, Green noted, is not merely the skewed picture we develop as a result, but how this picture informs clinical practice, and the labeling of certain choices, such as coming out to family members, as more psychologically healthy and mature than others. Many of these same critiques are raised by Chiara Bertone and Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli in their important new volume, Queerying Families of Origin, which highlights the unfortunate persistence of these problems into the 21st century. Although we have seen an explosion of lesbian, gay, and queer scholarship, and we have pushed boundaries and “queered” the family along many dimensions, the study of sexuality within families of origin remains comparatively narrow in its scope. Indeed, Bertone and Pallotta-Chiarolli open the book by highlighting “the gaps between the richness of research on GLBT lives, including experiences of intimacy and parenthood, and the paucity of research on their relations with their families of origin” (p. 1). This edited collection is one of the first systematic attempts to address the issues raised by Green at the turn of the century and to map future directions and innovations in the field.

Women’s Activism on Childcare in Italy and Denmark: The 1960s and 1970s

The 1960s and 1970s were a crucial time in Europe not only for the development of child care policies but also for the framing of new ideals of care for children under six. Despite basic differences in their welfare regimes, Denmark and Italy illustrate how foundational these decades were in shaping understandings of what is good child care and how it should be provided.

Profili di genere a tempo determinato : una ricerca sugli enti locali

Contingent work and gender: a research on local administrations Public administration represents a privileged context to investigate the gendered consequences of the diffusion of contract flexibility. A research on the use of lifetime and short-term contracts in local administrations in the province of Alessandria shows the presence of different gender profiles among flexible workers. For most men, short-term contracts are linked to leadership positions, or they represent a transition towards a stable job, as they do for part of the younger women. There is, instead, a great number of women who seem to be trapped in a row of badly qualified, very short and often part-time contracts, with long pauses in between: a highly precarious link with the workplace seems to be their longterm condition.