ABSTRACT
This chapter juxtaposes two texts published some twenty years apart that call into question, in quite antithetical ways, the 'ethnic' model of homosexuality and its implications of community and common interest. The bodies of Dolce and Gabbana were taken up to force a point of suture between text and the extratextual body in order to consolidate their presumed identities. In Elementi di critica omosessuale first published in 1977, Mario Mieli tries to theorize and as a result reform the confusions that surround sexuality, gender and the way they are lived in practice. De Lauretis's notion of gender/sexual identity as a form of 'self-representation' is both useful and necessary for appreciating the unpredictable ways in which identities are assumed. For de Lauretis, the body is a symptom of gender in the sense that it is the expression of how the subject inhabits the gender identity that has been made available to it and in which it has recognized itself.
