ABSTRACT
The book is composed of two parts, three chapters each, preceded by a prologue and an epilogue. These treat themes of Italian current events, which function as examples to interrogate the discriminatory rhetoric of the political forces on the right. The prologue lingers on the communicative strategies of Matteo Salvini, leader of the Lega Nord (Northern League), a sovereigntist and populist party that still, while I’m writing this proposal, leads the polls in the Italian political consensus. Behind his dulcet and pop tone, Salvini transmits violent messages geared toward making migrants and LGBTQI+ people enemies from which to defend the children of heterosexual and white families of Italian blood. In these messages, the sexual is used to create monsters out of dark-skinned migrant men—as prolific begetters of a new black or mixed-race population that could substitute the white population in Italy and as rapists of women and men—and gay men as exploiters of women (through the practice of surrogacy) and as pedophiles devoted to sexual practices “against nature.” Recalling the thinking of Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, and Umberto Eco, the prologue defines these strategies of abjection of the other as “neo-fascist,” and uses them as examples to understand how the sexual, and above all the anal, is implied in the political. Social bonds are edified at the expense of subjects who must be expelled from society as repulsive excrements.
