ABSTRACT
Homosexuality in their work acts as a prism through which other forms of cultural anxiety are brought into focus. Giovanni Comisso (1895-1969) began and ended his life in Treviso in the north east of Italy. One area in which the territorialization of space operates is precisely in terms of hetero/homosexual definition. Like the space of femininity, homosexual space has characteristically not been public, hence the shock value of homosexuality making itself, or being made, visible. The reading of the homosexual body in Catania revealed that bodies and places are material yet their materiality is shaped by fantasy and what might even be termed visual disturbance. The acts of displacement through which Comisso invents a space for his homosexuality are visual and discursive; they do map the world differently. Pastoral and the Orient provide the temporal and spatial forms for homosexuality, but they do not constitute its essence.
