On 25 July 2013, dozens of young people protested in front of the Chamber of Deputies in Rome. Sitting in front of a candle with their mouths bandaged, they held flags with the logo of the French Collective La Manif Pour Tous and wore T-shirts with slogans recalling the rhetoric of the French protesters: “LGBT privileges are not a national priority”, “You can’t bandage consciences”, “Against a liberticidal law”,1 As in France, the protests were triggered by Catholic social doctrine, although protesters presented themselves as apolitical and non-confessional citizens concerned about an “anthropological emergency” (Béraud and Portier 2015). They claimed to stand up for the “defense of the Human” and to combat the rise of the “Transhuman” brought about by “gender ideology”.
This political happening inaugurated Italian anti-gender protests. It was summoned by La Manif pour Tous-Italia (Demonstration for All-Italy – LMPTI), a newborn association, which directly recalled the French activist group. The same day in Paris, a group of Veilleurs (Vigils) protested in front of the Italian Embassy in solidarity with the Italian protestors. The outburst of the Italian anti-gender movement was encouraged by the French one, identified as the archetypical example to follow.
The Italian movement has specifically targeted two bills proposed since the beginning of the 17th Legislature in Spring 2013 – the Scalfarotto Bill against discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation and gender identity and the Cirinnà Bill on same-sex civil unions –, as well as the implementation of educational tools on gender equality and LGBTQ bullying in public primary schools. Education and homosexuality have indeed always been two priorities of the Vatican. Primarily, through political lobbying of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, the Vatican has tried to promote Catholic values in public education,2 to secure public funding for Catholic schools and to block any form of legal recognition for same-sex partnerships. Unlike divorce and abortion, the Vatican has succeeded until May 2016 to prevent any form of same-sex civil unions, presenting homosexuality as a moral issue that the Italian State has to leave under the Catholic Church’s jurisdiction (Dall’Orto 1988).3 Until then, the Italian Parliament has remained impermeable to the main claims of the LGBT movement, despite the preparation of dozens of bills since 1986, all of which have been trashed by Catholic MPs in parliamentary committees.4
Since 2008, lawyers and scholars working in the field of LGBTQ rights have brought the question of marriage equality for same-sex couples to the attention of Italian tribunals and courts. Their campaign, called Affermazione Civile (Civil Affirmation), led to the adoption of important legal improvements in matters such as immigration regulation, refugee status recognition, stepchild adoption and registration of foreign same-sex marriages (Winkler and Strazio 2015). This specific feature of the Italian context – favourable judicial rulings contrasting with the silence of the Parliament – is reflected in the primary role played by lawyers and magistrates in the anti-gender movement.5
This chapter aims to explain the political successes of the Italian anti-gender movement: it succeeded in blocking or weakening legal and educational reforms concerning sexual minorities and was able to shape the public debate on sexual rights in accordance with the terms used by anti-gender actors to frame their own discourse. This chapter first offers an outline of the emergence of the anti-gender discourse in the Italian public space. Then it maps out the main groups involved in its diffusion, examines their repertoire of action and scrutinizes their main rhetorical tropes. This allows me to show that the “anthropological” argument deployed by protesters as the foundation of the “Human” conveys a specific form of sexual nationalism which merges gender and “islamization” as two analogous enemies of the national/“natural” order. According to anti-gender activists, Italy embodies a civilizational model from where to resist the destruction of the “alphabet of the Human” produced by gender. These activists also consider their resistance should be emulated by other countries in Western Europe (Pellicciari 2008). As their French comrades, they regard gender as both a matter of “human anthropology” – that is “human nature” in Vatican’s terms – and an issue related to “national identity” (Fassin 2014; Perreau 2016).
Two national peculiarities are put forward to explain the success of anti-gender protests. The first is connected to the preponderance of the concept of “sexual difference” in the Italian public space, creating a fertile ground for naturalistic discourses on the sexual order. Its essentialism resonates in deep concert with the Vatican’s view on the existence of a “feminine genius”. The second relates to the paradoxical form of Italian familism, which is still characterized, despite the sacralization of the conjugal heterosexual family, by weak family policies and a central role of the Catholic Church in supplying services to families. Hence, the anti-gender rhetoric, which promotes a re-naturalization of the sexual order and of the division of labour, fits into a social regime in which intergenerational relationships are supplied by family solidarity – notably by women’s domestic work – and by private care services that are often connected to the Catholic Church (Saraceno 2008).
When the first anti-gender mobilizations took place in 2013, they could rely on an earlier Catholic critique of gender, which had started rather unnoticed ten years before with the first Italian edition of the Lexicon: Ambiguous and Debatable Terms Regarding Family, Life and Ethical Questions (Pontifical Council for the Family [2003] 2006). This dictionary on sexuality and bioethical issues is the first systematization of the rhetorical device invented by the Vatican after the Beijing Conference to delegitimize analyses affirming that sex and sexuality are political issues. This book, which, as presented by the Human Life International’s website, is meant to be a “powerful antidote to a cultural poison”, counts more than 15 Italian authors out of 70, among whom three conservative Cardinals (Carlo Caffarra, Angelo Scola and Elio Sgreccia), the founder of the Movimento per la Vita (Movement for Life) (Carlo Casini) and the president of the Unione dei Giuristi Cattolici Italiani (Union of the Italian Catholic Jurists) (Francesco D’Agostino).
One year after the Lexicon’s publication, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger published the Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration between Men and Women in which he celebrated the value of “sexual difference” and accused feminists of using the concept of gender in order to “obscure sexual difference”.6 This rhetorical charge targeting what the Vatican calls “gender feminists” was praised by Luisa Muraro, the main representative of the “pensiero della differenza sessuale” (sexual difference feminism) (Muraro 2004) or popular atheist essayists such as Giuliano Ferrara.7 Hence, a discourse that posits an “ontological difference” between the sexes and celebrates it as the ground of “human anthropology” can easily find objective allies in a country where the notion of “sexual difference” is a reference category in the political and intellectual fields. Vatican’s “new feminism”, which promotes the “feminine genius”, resonates with sexual difference feminism, which is still nowadays the main feminist framework in many Italian intellectual circles. A few years later, in 2007, the attack on gender was taken up by the anti-abortion association, Scienza e Vita (Science and Life), which published a special issue of its journal on “gender ideology” and organized a congress in 2008 to “unveil its dangers”.
Nonetheless, despite these isolated and unremarked events, references to gender long remained politically insignificant in a country where this concept and the theories it inspired are hardly discussed or taught in academia. Gender and sexuality studies are evanescent, lack institutional legitimacy, face strong resistances (Di Cori 2013) and are often influenced by “sexual difference”, which is at odds with anti-essentialist feminist analyses (Perilli 2005). Unsurprisingly, gender is not even translated in Italian, even if the word “genere” does exist.8 The use of the English term is meant to convey the alleged foreign origin of the concept, as well as its unfitness to the Italian context.
Symptomatically, gender was not mentioned during the Family Day, a rally organized in 2007 by Catholic associations to counter a bill on same-sex unions proposed by Romano Prodi’s Government (the Di.Co. bill). According to the essayist Angela Pellicciari, a member of the Neocatechumenal Way, this event marked the beginning of a “new European movement” in which Italy represents the “bastion of the human civilization” (Pellicciari 2008). In 2007, Family Day activists did not need the word gender to stop legal reforms on LGBTQ issues, although their discourse was already relying on the notions of “human anthropology”, “feminine genius” and the “protection of the child”. This event can however be regarded as the direct antecedent of “anti-gender” mobilizations.
To sum up, until 2013, the term “gender” as conceived of by the Vatican was not only obscure, but also useless in the Italian debate. However, following the success of French anti-gender demonstrations, the rhetorical device constructed on the syntagma “gender ideology” suddenly spread across the Italian political field. It produced an extraordinary discursive proliferation on “gender”, which was then identified by Italian protesters and by the media as the enemy against which French protesters were successfully demonstrating. Paradoxically, gender has started to exist as an efficient political category thanks to the Vatican. It was not only appropriated by protestors in the terms constructed by the Vatican – a hotchpotch mixing and distorting different feminist and queer theories and claims – but it was also re-signified as the symbol of what these conservative actors regarded as abnormal and anti-national in the contemporary Italian context.
In Italy, “gender ideology” operates as a rallying cry that gathers a vast heterogeneous front of conservative actors. Interconnected in complex and ductile ways, not only do these groups share a common grammar – gender as “ideological colonization” – and a political target – any form of denaturalization of the sexual order –, but they also use gender as an open label to reformulate their own specific political issues. Additionally, the humanist rhetoric brandished by protesters – gender is defined as the antonymous of the “Human” – produces a make-up effect whitewashing the presence of non-democratic movements into their ranks (Kováts and Põim 2015). We can thus distinguish between three sorts of actors involved in the dissemination of the anti-gender discourse: the Vatican, who invented the rhetorical device in mid-2000s (Fillod 2014; Paternotte 2015; Paternotte, van der Dussen and Piette 2016) and propelled it with the help of the Italian bishops; new protest groups like La Manif pour Tous-Italia and Sentinelle in piedi, which embody the anti-gender crusade in the public eye; and a few already-existing anti-abortion associations which, in connection with traditionalist groups and some Far-Right activists, constitute the driving force of the protest (Avanza 2016; De Guerre 2015–2016).
Due to its economic and symbolic interests, the Vatican operates in Italy as a national political actor, directly interfering in the political agenda, notably on bioethical, sexual and educational issues (Polchi 2009; Giorgi and Ozzano 2016). The main instrument of propagation of Vatican’s politics in the country is the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI), peculiarly the only national bishops’ conference where the president and the secretary-general are directly appointed by the pope. The CEI also manages the agreements regulating the relationship between the Italian State and the Vatican and is considered by the latter as the primus inter pares of all national Bishops’ Conferences, the closest and the most loyal to the Holy See.
Both Vatican’s and CEI’s highest representatives have been spreading the discourse on “gender ideology” since its onset at the beginning of the 2000s, and they have been using it as their weapon after the outburst of anti-gender protests in 2013. However, these actors do not unanimously agree on the form of support to give to anti-gender protests and on the degree of acceptability of specific forms of legal recognition for same-sex couples.
A predominant intransigent line upholds the rise of a public protest in defence of “human anthropology” and opposes any form of legal recognition of same-sex unions. This line is represented by the CEI’s president, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, close to Opus Dei, and Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, one of the Lexicon’s authors as well as the co-author of the book Remaining in the Faith of Christ. Cardinal Caffarra, for example, exhorted Catholics to “fight to defend natural law as they should fight to defend the ramparts of the town” in an interview to the Comunione e Liberazione magazine Tempi. Cardinal Bagnasco and Cardinal Piacenza acted as speakers at the Italian Circuli Minores during the 2015 Synod of Bishops on the Family, where they both strongly condemned “gender ideology”. In October 2015 a meeting gathered a few actors of this intransigent front: Cardinal Gerhard Müller, Cardinal Camillo Ruini and Marcello Pera, the former president of the Italian Senate and founder of the right-wing think tank Magna Carta. Interestingly, the conference was not only the occasion to reaffirm that “gender ideology destroys the Human”, but also to explain that “moral decadence” induced by gender is the combined result of the refusal of Europe’s Christian roots and of the threat posed by “islamization”.9 By reactivating an opposition between the insiders and the outsiders within the national body, anti-gender rhetoric depicts gender and Islam as the defining marks of what is radically “Other” and cannot be assimilated. This argument, where the “anthropological” reference to “human nature” and the cultural reference to “national identity” merge, has become a recurring trope of anti-gender actors.
Next to the intransigent front, a minority group, represented by the CEI’s General Secretary, Mgr. Nunzio Galantino, prefers political and parliamentary lobbying over street demonstrations. It aims at eroding the content of legal reforms rather than opposing them. Concerning same-sex civil unions, Nunzio Galantino and other Bishops such as Edoardo Menichelli backed up a solution that would recognize few rights for same-sex couples, such as inheritance and alimony, the right of making decisions on funeral arrangements and organ donation when partner dies, but would prohibit any parental rights and reaffirm the non-equivalence between same-sex unions and heterosexual marriage. These two fronts act simultaneously, so that every legal or political reform aimed at denaturalizing the sexual order faces a double opposition: an external and frontal one meant to stop any change and an internal one meant to water down their content.
The Italian anti-gender movement is personified by LMPTI, which, unlike the French collective, is a single association and not a coalition. During the first months of the protest, the reference to the French movement worked as a mark of recognition and of political legitimization.10 As in the German and the Finnish cases, the name operated as a brand: non-French users capitalized on the success of French protesters and shared the same rhetoric and political goals, but were autonomous in defining specific targets, forms of action and allies. Notably, LMPTI embodies the recognizable anti-gender leader in the public debate, collecting and spreading information over initiatives that are launched by other associations or collectives like mail-bombing ministers or days of withdrawal from school.11
While LMPTI has not been immune from critiques from traditional groups, which accused it to domesticate Catholics’ dissent, it succeeded in becoming an umbrella association for a wide front of protesters. Notably it aims at bridging the Forum delle Associazioni Familiari (Forum of Family Associations), which gathers the main Catholic family associations and is tightly connected to the CEI, with groups that are parts of a galaxy of traditionalist and Far-Right movements (Alleanza Cattolica [Catholic Alliance], Fondazione Lepanto [Lepanto Foundation], Milithia Christi [Militia of Jesus Christ], Christus Rex [Christ the King] or the Lefebvrian Fraternity Society of Saint Pius X). Moreover, by inserting Italian mobilizations in a transnational movement, LMPTI operates as the Italian relay of transnational initiatives such as the European citizens’ initiative Mum Dad & Kids. The LMPTI’s headquarters are located at the home address of the president of the association, and, although around 80 local LMPTI clubs have been created across the country, most of them are mere letter boxes. Hence, lacking logistic structures, LMPTI operates mainly through an effective online militancy. All LMPTI board members are young (born in the 1980s) and, except for its president, Jacopo Coghe, representative of the Neocatechumenal Way, they were not active in Catholic associations before.
LMPTI works in connection with a plethora of recently founded committees of concerned citizens, such as Difendiamo i nostri figli (Let’s Defend Our Children), Di mamma ce n’è una sola (There Is Only One Mum), Famiglia Educazione e Libertà (Family, Education and Freedom) and Sì alla famiglia (Yes to the Family), thereby giving the impression of a multiplicity of actors. However, when inventorying them, De Guerre points out that such committees are interconnected empty containers relying on the same few anti-gender actors, who often belong to already-existing anti-abortion associations (De Guerre 2015–2016). Since August 2013, LMPTI has been backed up by a new protest group, Sentinelle in Piedi (Standing Sentries), which holds vigils in public spaces in the wake of the French Vigils. These actors represent the front stage of Italian anti-gender protest, the ones to which media outlets mainly refer when talking about anti-gender mobilizations. They present themselves as concerned, non-religious and non-political citizens acting against the “anthropological revolution” destroying “Human nature”.
Even if LMPTI and Sentinelle have been attracting media and political attention as the protagonists of anti-gender mobilizations, three anti-abortion groups belonging to the radical fringes of Catholic associations – Scienza e Vita, Giuristi per la Vita and Notizie Pro-Vita (Prolife News) – are the most active and effective actors. As Martina Avanza points out, they provide the movement with resources and skills accumulated by anti-abortion activists (Avanza 2015). For them, gender operates as a political opportunity to revitalize their activism and promote the anti-abortion cause in a more socially acceptable form. Additionally, it is also a rhetorical tool to reformulate reactionary arguments in a nationalistic way. The war on gender emerges as a struggle to defend “traditional values”, restore the “natural order” and define the national community.
These anti-abortion groups present similar characteristics: all of them are autonomous vis-à-vis the Movimento per la Vita and the CEI, they are connected to some Vatican’s Dicasteries and Academies, notably within the Pontifical Academy for Life and the Pontifical Council for the Family, they are recent and share similar associative goals (reference to “the anthropological question”), way of functioning (resort to expertise) and connections to transnational conservative groups, traditionalist movements and the two main Italian xenophobic parties, Lega Nord (the North League) and Fratelli d’Italia-Alleanza Nazionale (Brothers of Italy-National Alliance).
Scienza e Vita was the first anti-abortion association spreading the anti-gender discourse in 2007. It was founded in 2004 with the support of the CEI to become the leader of a campaign launched by the Vatican to stop the referendum on assisted reproductive technology. Currently, it counts among its members all the key actors of the anti-gender campaign, gathering activists from different backgrounds: Movimento per la Vita, Alleanza Cattolica, the Neocathecumenal Path, the Opus Dei and others (De Guerre 2015–2016).12
While Scienza e Vita is a platform connecting different conservative actors, Giuristi per la vita and Notizie Pro-Vita mainly operate as the Italian referents of international and transnational anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ groups, as well as a bridge towards identitarian and Far-Right actors. The founder and president of the Giuristi per la Vita, Gianfranco Amato, is connected to U.S. conservative groups. He is notably the Italian allied attorney of Alliance Defending Freedom and member of Advocates International. Toni Brandi, who created Notizia-Provita, is close to the Lefebvrian Society of Saint Pius X and to neo-fascist groups such as Forza Nuova.
Both Scienza e Vita and Notizie Pro-Vita were created in 2012 in the wake of the political effervescence produced by the anti-abortion and traditionalist group, Famiglia Domani (Family Tomorrow), a member of Voice of the Family, an international organization gathering major anti-abortion groups such as Human Life International (HLI) (De Guerre 2015–2016).13 Famiglia Domani’s former president, Luigi Coda Nunziante, was a militant of the neo-fascist party Movimento Sociale Italiano and one of the Italian signers of the transnational “Appeal to the Pope”, together with Amato and Brandi. This appeal was published before the Synod on the Family and was intended to seek the Pope uphold on traditional Catholic Church teachings on marriage and family. Famiglia Domani is one of the key actors of the March for Life, an event organized every year in Rome by radical anti-abortion, traditionalist and neo-fascist groups dissenting with the politics expressed by the Movimento per la Vita, whose politics are considered too mild when it comes to secularization. Supported by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Opus Dei and the “Black Nobility” – the Roman aristocratic families supporting the Papacy as a political authority –, this event includes delegations of foreign organizations such as Legionaries of Christ, Human Life International and the Laogai Research Foundation (De Guerre 2015–2016).
To fuel anti-gender protests, Scienza e Vita, Giuristi per la Vita and Notizie Pro-Vita work in close connection with Alleanza Cattolica. This traditionalist group is politically well established: among its prominent members are magistrate Alfredo Mantovano, sociologist Massimo Introvigne and historian Roberto De Mattei, who have all played key roles in Italian political institutions.14 Alleanza Cattolica is connected to Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), a powerful reactionary movement created in Brazil, which opposes the “Western Civilization”, individualism and democracy in the name of Catholicism.
These groups interact with Far-Right political parties such as Lega Nord and Fratelli d’Italia, as well as neo-fascist and identitarian groups such as Officine identitarie, Circolo Proudhon and Mille Patrie. The latters, in turn, are connected to neo-fascist foreign groups like the French Bloc Identitaire and German Pegida. These activists publish anti-gender texts, organize conferences and invite ideologues such as Aleksandr Dugin, Alain de Benoist or Eric Zemmour. For the groups of this radical pole, “gender ideology” and its “unbounded individualism and egalitarianism” are fruits of capitalism and opposing them means promoting an idea of “national identity” in which the notions of “Christian roots” and “natural family” are intertwined.
The participation of the leaders of Scienza e Vita, Giuristi per la Vita and Notizie Pro-Vita at the international meetings such as the World Congress of Families (WCF) testifies their primary role in spreading anti-gender protest. The WCF’s latest edition, on the theme “Civilization at The Crossroads: The Natural Family as the Bulwark of Freedom and Human Values”, took place in Tbilisi in May 2016. The two leaders of Notizie Pro-Vita, Toni Brandi and Alessandro Fiore (the son of the neo-fascist group Forza Nuova’s head) were invited to give a talk on “gender and education”. During the 2016 edition, the main international anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ actors met. Among them, the National Organization for Marriage (whose Director Brian Brown was appointed as new president of the WCF), Alliance Defending Freedom International, CitizenGo and the Pontifical Academy for Life. The Russian nationalist Alexey Komov – who has been regularly invited to Italy by Toni Brandi since 2013 – supervised the organization of the event and the choice of invitees.
Anti-gender protesters mobilize a set of rhetorical arguments in which the heterosexual conjugal family is the fundament of humanity, civilization and national community. If such a discourse reactivates the main recurrent rhetorical topoï of familialist and anti-LGBTQ mobilizations, anti-gender protests deploy specific features related to the social, political and legal context in which anti-gender discourse has emerged. Notably, in order to produce a political effect, the anti-gender rhetoric needs to develop a socially acceptable and audible discourse. For that reason anti-gender protesters deploy a formal aggiornamento of familialistic and homophobic arguments that combines the notion of “natural family” with references to human rights and the defence of the weak. Instead of claiming the inferiority of women and LGBTQ people, activists emphasize the notion of “human nature”, which main feature is held to be the complementarity between the sexes. Following this line, the notions of “family”, “nation”, “nature” and “heterosexuality” overlap and the children are presented as the innocent victim of LGBTQ people’s egoistic and hedonistic drives.15 Anti-gender rhetoric refers both to the commodification of the children and to the marketing of female bodies. Hence, during events, posters are seen with images of frightened infants and children, and slogans are uttered to claim the “children’s right of having a father and a mother” and the “right of access to their biological truth”. Anti-gender protesters focus on filiation – “our children” – because the way in which it is legally defined frames the legitimate way in which a given society reproduces. As Bruno Perreau has shown studying the French case, this trope displays two intertwined reactionary tropes revived by anti-gender activists: homosexuality as a contagious disease threatening children and “national purity” and the stigmatization of minorities by depicting them not as oppressed and essentialized groups, but as powerful lobbies (Perreau 2016).
To spread a view in which heterosexuality organizes social – and national – reproduction, anti-gender actors use different modes of action explicitly referred to as reactions to an “anthropological emergency”. Each of them pursues a specific aim. Conferences run by experts intend to explain the precepts of “human anthropology”; standing vigils performed in public space by concerned citizens are in opposition to a “totalitarian ideology”, and street demonstrations organized by Catholic family associations aim at reaffirming that the “natural family” is the basis of the national community, hence in need of a better support by the Italian State.
The reference to science is a keystone of anti-gender rhetoric.16 The so-called “human anthropology” is presented as a matter of scientific and theological evidence, as opposed to gender, which is depicted as an “ideology”. Theology and science would both affirm that men and women are natural groups, which are both equal in dignity and complementary in predispositions and missions. It is therefore not surprising that the two most outspoken actors of this crusade are a medical doctor (Massimo Gandolfini) and a lawyer (Gianfranco Amato), who both speak in the name of their expertise without acknowledging their religious and political beliefs.
The congress which launched the anti-gender mobilization was organized by Scienza e Vita and Famiglia Domani in September 2013 in Verona. Speakers belonged either to anti-abortions, traditionalist associations or to Universities run by Opus Dei or Legion of Christ (De Guerre 2015–2016; De Guerre and Prearo 2016).17 Since then, hundreds of conferences have taken place in halls and auditoriums made available by parishes or local authorities run by right-wing parties (Lavizzari and Prearo 2016). Sometimes “ex-homosexuals”, such as Luca di Tolve, take the stage to share their experience of “healing”.18 Similarly, foreign guests, such as French Ludivine de la Rochère and Eric Zemmour or Russian Alexei Komov and Aleksandr Dugin, have been invited to present their political experience and boost the transnationalization of the movement. When there is only one speaker, such as Massimo Gandolfini, Gianfranco Amato, journalist Costanza Miriano or essayist Mario Adinolfi, conferences take usually the form of pep talks in front of worried parents.19 These one-man shows are then broadcasted on YouTube channels run by Catholic traditionalist groups and reach thousands of spectators.
Speakers use references to “anthropology” and to science to present their views as non-political and non-religious and combine them with a millenarist tone demonizing gender and evoking the end of civilization and the destruction of humanity (Lavizzari and Prearo 2016). The mix between (pseudo-)science and apocalyptic catastrophism is a typical trope of reactionary discourses aiming at increasing moral panic in order to restore a “natural order” (Rennes 2014). The panic about gender tends to push people targeted by “anti-gender” discourse (jurists, scholars, activists) to develop a defensive discourse (“gender ideology” does not exist) which ends up legitimizing the terms of the debate as posed by the Vatican and invisibilizing feminist or queer theories which affirm not only that gender exists and is a social construction, but also that sex is a political category (Delphy 2001).
Standing in a square block in front of a town hall or a court of justice, silently absorbed in reading books at about two yards from one another, activists of the group Sentinelle in Piedi (Standing Sentinels) have been organizing vigils in the Italian public space since summer 2013. Sentinelle present themselves as concerned citizens protesting to defend a freedom of speech endangered by the prospect of legislation on homophobia. More broadly, they oppose the pertinence of the notion of homophobia and “the totalitarian nature of gender”. Although they claim to be apolitical, they are closely connected to the traditionalist movement Alleanza Cattolica.20
They explicitly refer to the words spoken by John Paul II during his first visit to the United States in October 1979, during which the Polish Pope encouraged Catholics to “stand up when a child is looked upon only as means to satisfy an emotional need and when the institution of marriage is abandoned to human selfishness”. In October 2015, as the Synod on the Family was about to open, a coordinated vigil, involving one hundred different cities across Italy, was organized by the Sentinels. In three years, hundreds of vigils have been held, in particular in North-Eastern Italy, where the Far-Right parties and groups have close relations with local administrations and are generally more involved in anti-gender protests (Avanza 2015). This new form of protest mixes heterogeneous elements from other forms of occupation of public spaces (flash mobs, street prayers, military parades).
Framed in time and space, each vigil may be seen as a mise-en-espace and a performance. Each element of the scenic device aims at impressing the public and erasing both the religious origin of the protest and the participants’ sexual and political conservatism. The act of reading books conveys the idea that Sentinelle are trying to implement a “permanent education”, as they call it, free from cultural manipulations.21 In these performances, protesters face counter-demonstrations by LGBTQ groups imperturbably and accuse these groups of being threatening, insulting and violent. Spatial and bodily arrangements allow sentinels to present themselves as the heirs of revolutionary and pacific figures, such as Gandhi or Socrates.
The cause defended by the Sentinelle has been framed as a battle for freedom against the colonization of consciences. This relies on a repertoire of arguments referring to the semantic of the “Resistance” and of the defence of “the weak”, specifically represented by children. The act of standing in public aims at portraying the movement as a form of opposition to totalitarian regimes, implicitly referring to other forms of citizen protests like the Arab Springs, protesters in Istanbul’s Taksim Square or the activists debout (standing) in Paris. The use of silence – which significantly opposes Act-Up’s slogan “SILENCE = DEATH” – is meant to be a warning of the threats to freedom of speech.
In brief, the Sentinelle’s rhetoric rejects the oppressive system of norms, which considers women and LGBTQ people as inferior and reverses it. To them, women and sexual minorities constitute powerful lobbies running international institutions, promoting forms of “totalitarian conformism” and preventing opinions from being expressed. To support their view, they often refer to dystopic literature. George Orwell’s 1984 and Robert Benson’s Lord of the World (which Pope Francis has recently declared being his favourite book) are among the books they hold in their hands. This scenic device contributes to the idea that minorities are the agents of oppression, while anti-gender protesters are the real victims. During their vigils, Sentinels are safeguarded by the police who, at the same time, act severely to block LGBTQ counter-manifestations. The resident of Circolo Pink (Pink Circle), one of the most active groups in organizing counter-demonstrations, was intimidated by the DIGOS agents while protesting against a vigil in Verona and harshly fined because he refused to leave the place.22
The Sentinelle represent an example of the transnational circulation and local hybridization of the modes of action of the “anti-gender” movement. Their success outdid that of their French antecedent, Les Veilleurs debout, to the point that the French group changed its name into Sentinelles to capitalize on the Italian Sentinelle and create a clearly recognizable transnational movement (Della Sudda 2015).
Eight years after the Family Day that stopped the introduction of civil unions, new editions of this event were organized in June 2015 and in January 2016 by the anti-gender committee Difendiamo i nostri figli.23 They explicitly targeted “gender theory as ideological colonization” and the Cirinnà’s bill, whose discussion in the Senate started three days after the January protest. In 2007, the rally was explicitly backed by the Bishops’ Conference and gathered all the Catholic movements and associations, ranging from Forum delle Associazioni Familiari (FAF) to Comunione e Liberazione and from the Charismatic movement to the Neocatechumenal Way. Conversely, in 2015 and 2016, these events only got limited support from the Episcopacy. The president of the CEI and the Vatican’s Secretary of State endorsed the initiative, whereas the CEI General Secreatary opposed it because it frontally opposed the Parliament. Pope Francis did not explicitly support the protest, but he warned that there should be no confusion between “the family demanded by God and any other type of unions” a few days before the 2016 meeting. The split within the CEI between frontal opponents and lobbyists was mirrored by Catholic associations. Only the more radical ones considered the act of taking the street as an effective way to influence the Parliament, whereas the leaders of the movements such as Communion and Liberation, Rinnovamento dello Spirito and FAF preferred more discrete forms of lobbying, even though they showed their solidarity towards their members who chose to demonstrate. For that reason, in 2015 and 2016 the Family Day displayed a more radical outline. This contributed, on the one hand, to the absence of the family associations, which are closely connected to the Bishops’ Conference and, on the other hand, to the presence of Far-Right organizations such as Forza Nuova and Casa Pound. Protesters claimed that what they call the “natural family” – that is the heterosexual and conjugal one – is the foundation of the “natural order” and of the national community and should be better supported by the State.
The two latest editions of the Family Day offered to anti-gender protesters the opportunity to depict Italy as “a lighthouse and a trailblazer in safeguarding civilization and respect for children”.24 In their slogans, Italy was opposed to “Gayropa” and “Gaystapo”, and gender portrayed as the symbol of Western capitalism, individualism and egoism. In presenting Italy as an “advanced outpost of humanity”, anti-gender protesters use and reverse the nationalist argument framing Europe or, more broadly the West, as “sexual exceptional” and opposing advanced versus backward countries (Fassin 2010; Colpani and Habed 2014). The idea of Italy as a “trailblazer” fosters the imaginary of an “anti-gender Europe” resisting a totalitarian “rainbow Europe”. Interestingly, in Italy, such “Europes” are both constructed in opposition to the supposed sexual and cultural Otherness of racialized groups.25
A banner, which became the symbol of these protests, claimed that gender was “the dung of the Devil”. This slogan paraphrases a statement by Pope Francis, who used this stunning quote from Basil of Caesarea to criticize capitalism. Other slogans compared “gender imperialism” with Islamism and accused them of destroying the “natural family”: the former by erasing the principle of sexual difference, the latter by promoting polygamy and dismissing women rights. This argument has been used in Italy since the beginning of 2000s, notably in texts accompanying two parliamentary bills asking for legal inscription of “sexual difference” into the Italian Constitution (Calderoli’s bill in 2002 and Malan’s bill in 2009) as well as in books written by the leader of Alleanza Cattolica, magistrate Alfredo Mantovano (2004, 2006, 2007). The same rhetoric has been used again in the wake of the supposed rapes of the New Year’s Eve in Germany by Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni, leaders of Lega Nord and Fratelli d’Italia, respectively. This mix of anti-feminist, homophobic, xenophobic but also femonationalistic elements draws boundaries between “us” and “them” in sexual terms and constitutes a specific form of sexual nationalism in contemporary Italy.26 As Eric Fassin argues, such rhetorical device has been circulating since the beginning of the 2000s, when the rhetoric of a sexual clash of civilizations, inflected differently depending on the national context, has been used to define the borders of Europe while embodying national identities (Fassin 2010).
Since its invention at the beginning of the 2000s, the anti-gender rhetoric started to seep in the Italian context. Ten years later, following the French protests against same-sex marriage reform, an anti-gender protest movement was launched by the most radical groups among the anti-abortions associations and quickly achieved significant political success. Indeed, the discussion of the bill on hate crimes related to sexual orientation and gender identity has been abandoned (Winkler and Strazio 2015). Furthermore, if the bill on same-sex civil unions adopted in May 2016 under the pressure of an ECtHR’s decision may be considered as a historical achievement, it can also be read as a half defeat for the LGBTQ movement.27 Indeed, while the law offers rights similar to those of married couples, at behest of the Nuovo Centro Destra (New Centre Right), the provision that would have granted parental rights to non-biological parents was struck down, as was the requirement of faithfulness for partners. Both these omissions aimed at reaffirming the non-equivalence between marriage and civil unions.28 Finally, the implementation of a strategy against homophobia and transphobia in schools has been blocked since 2014, only a few days after the president of CEI, Cardinal Bagnasco, expressed his opposition against “the dictatorship of gender that is transforming public schools in re-educational camps and indoctrination”.29
Other political effects have to be mentioned as they show how the expression “gender ideology” succeeded in becoming an effective political category in Italy. Children books articulating family diversity have been withdrawn from public primary schools; several town halls have adopted resolutions against “gender ideology”; anti-gender phone lines have been created by public authorities to allow worried parents to denounce the presence of “gender” in educational programmes; slogans such as “our local administration is against gender ideology” have been broadcasted by led signposts at crossroads in few municipalities.
More broadly, anti-gender protesters succeeded in imposing the terms of public debate on sexual issues. The expressions gender and “gender ideology”, as defined by the Vatican, are used by politicians and media and have been accepted as a legitimate principle of vision and division. The expression “anti-gender” itself stems from the invention of Vatican’s gender. This has fostered forms of equalization of the two positions (“pro” and “anti”) which are forms of legitimization of sexist and homophobic positions. A symptomatic example of the rhetorical and political success of the anti-gender crusade is the use of “gender ideology” as a label in few Italian bookstores. New shelves have appeared in which gender scholars’ books stand alongside anti-gender’s authors’ texts as if they represent different yet equally legitimate intellectual positions, whereas anti-gender essayists are but political activists connected with Far-Right groups.
The political and cultural success of “gender ideology” lies in the formal features of this discursive device – a Catholic discourse reproduced as an anthropological evidence on human nature –, in its impressive rhetoric euphemizing its sexism, antifeminism, homophobia and transphobia – notably, the use of the notions of victimhood and resistance –, in its capacity of bridging different feminist and queer theories and issues – from abortion to surrogacy – and in creating a moral panic that responds to a number of anxieties produced during a period of austerity, political and economic crisis (Grzebalska 2016).
Two national peculiarities must be underlined to explain how such a device could spread and radicate. First, the predominance of the doctrine of sexual difference in the intellectual field plays a crucial role. Not only is gender an unknown analytical category, but as a concept denaturalizing the sexual order it is also rejected by influent groups of intellectuals. It comes therefore with little surprise that the anti-gender discourse was welcomed by influential feminists like Luisa Muraro.30 Similarly, influent marxists, like Mario Tronti, founder of Operaismo, and Giuseppe Vacca, president of Fondazione Gramsci, launched in 2011 a “Manifest for the anthropological emergency” to reaffirm the necessity of an alliance between Catholics and non-Catholics in defence of “non-negotiable values”.31 Hence, “sexual difference” and “anthropological emergency”, the two notions at the core of the anti-gender rhetoric, reverberate far beyond catholic circles.
The paradoxical form of Italian familialism constitutes a second crucial element. While the family is sacred in public discourse and referred to as the basis of national identity, family policies remain marginal and fragmentary (Saraceno 2008). Under the pressure of Catholic lobbyists, the Italian State prefers to sustain families by funding private health care institutions or schools. At the same time, confronted by underdeveloped family policies, Italian families are forced to rely on intergenerational and internal solidarity (that is, on female domestic work) and on private structures, most of them supplied by structures linked to the Catholic Church.32 In this sense, anti-gender protest is based on a fallacious argument linking the absence of significant familiar policies characterizing Italian Welfare State and the legal recognition of same-sex unions. Italian families are indeed not poorly supported by the State because of the demand of recognition by the LGBTQ people, but because the Catholic Church keeps operating to prevent the State from replacing itself in regulating family relationships. As stated in the Reports on the economic situation of the country by the Italian Economy Minister, Italy occupies the second to last position before Poland in public expenditure for family and motherhood. This tendency is in perfect continuity with five decades of Christian Democratic political dominance.
These two national structural traits, the hegemonic role of the notion of “sexual difference” and the paradoxes of Italian familialism, show how the success of the “anti-gender” crusade has to be related to the political, economical and cultural role played by the Vatican in contemporary Italy. In this sense, the Italian anti-gender movement must be apprehended as a new episode in the long-term match between the Vatican and the Italian State to define what is a couple and a family and to determine the modes of social reproduction considered as “legitimate” and “natural”, in which the Italian State has often been operating as an ally (that is not a competitor) of the Vatican.
More generally, “gender ideology” may be conceptualized as a counter-revolutionary political invention reacting to what Colette Guillaumin defined as the theoretical and political revolution produced by feminist and LGBTQ theorists and activists when affirming that not only gender, but also the sexes and sexualities were products of social relationships (Guillaumin 1995). Anti-gender discourse and its success have indeed to be put in relation with the persisting strength of what Monique Wittig called “the straight mind”, that is, the belief that men and women are natural and complementary groups (Wittig 1992). Thanks to the social arrangements producing and naturalizing the differences between men and women, these convictions dwell deeply shared. As the Italian context displays, anti-gender protests capitalize the force of this naturalistic belief, rephrases it and impresses many more than just Catholic actors.
1.I am grateful to Adriano J. Habed and Yàdad De Guerre for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
2.A symptom of the influence of the Vatican on public education is the weekly teaching of Catholic doctrine. From nursery school through high school, all students are obliged to take either a weekly hour of religious instruction or an alternative of some sort. Ninety per cent of Italian public school students continue to receive religious education from Catholic priests or Catholic laypeople selected by the Vatican and paid by the Italian State. Moreover, in 2006, the Supreme Administrative Court stated that the display of crucifix in classrooms of state schools did not violate the principle of secularism, since the crucifix has to be considered as a symbol of national cultural values. The ruling has been confirmed by the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in 2011. The attorney defending the cause was Gianfranco Amato, the founder and the president of Giuristi per la Vita (Jurists for Life) and a member of Scienza e Vita (Science and Life).
3.A law on divorce was adopted in 1970 and abortion was decriminalized in 1978, even if the high rate of conscientious objectors (70% of gynaecologists, up to 83% in some southern regions) severely limits access to abortion in practice. In April 2016, the Council of Europe denounced the Italian situation stating that the number of Italian objectors may involve considerable risks for women’s health and well-being.
4.In 1986, the Inter-Parliamentary Women’s Communist group supported by Arcigay (Italy’s main gay rights organization) raised for the first time the issue of civil unions within the Italian Parliament. Two years later, Alma Cappiello introduced the first bill in Parliament calling for the acknowledgment of cohabitation between “two persons”. From 1988 to 2016, several bills on the legal recognition of same-sex unions were presented in Parliament: same-sex marriage (e.g. Grillini 2002; Poretti 2008), civil partnership restricted to same-sex couples (Soda 1998; De Simone 2002; Grillini 2003) and civil union (notably, PaCS 2002; CUS 2007; DiCo 2007; DiDoRe 2008). None of these has ever been debated in Parliament.
5.No less than three associations of jurists referring to “Natural Law” as the source of the production of legislation are fuelling anti-gender protests: Giuristi per la Vita, the Unione Giuristi Cattolici Italiani (Union of Catholic Italian Jurists) and the Centro Studi Livatino (Livatino Study Center).
6.Cardinal Ratzinger started denouncing the danger of the “trivialization” of “sexual difference” in 1985 (Ratzinger and Messori 1985: 93–109).
7.The demonization of gender and “gender feminists” is the ultimate outcome of the Vatican’s longer-term antifeminism (dating back from Pius XII) (Couture 2012; Garbagnoli 2015) and of the progressive adoption of the doctrine of the complementarity between the sexes by the Catholic Church (Case 2016). Under the label “gender ideology” the Vatican specifically targets queer and materialist feminist theories affirming that not only gender but also “sex” is a political category. Given her radical constructivist approach and her considerable international renown, Judith Butler is presented as the “Papess of gender”.
8.On the theoretical and political issues raised by the circulation and the translation of the concept of gender, see Delphy (2001) and Delphy, Molinier, Clair and Sandrine (2012).
9.These themes and the claim for a “healthy secularism” based on Christian roots were central in Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam, a co-authored book by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and Marcello Pera published in 2004 (Ratzinger and Pera 2006) and in the fourth annual report on the Social Doctrine of the Church in the world written by the Observatory Cardinal Van Thuân (2012).
10.The French expression “Manif pour Tous” is not translated in Italian. In November 2015, LMPTI changed its name in Generazione Famiglia – La Manif Pour Tous Italia (Generation Family - LMPTI) as the success of the Italian movement made the reference to the French collective unnecessary.
11.Following the “Day of withdrawal from school” organized in France by Farida Belghoul (Fassin 2014), in March 2014, the main Italian association gathering Catholic parents launched the initiative to withdraw children from public primary schools once per month to protest against “gender’s ideological colonization”. Parents were notably alerted through Whatsapp and encouraged to join the protest through blogs and forums connected to Far-Right groups.
12.Among its members: Paola Binetti (MP, linked to Opus Dei’s Universidad de Navarra and Università Campus Bio-Medico in Rome), Carlo Casini (founder and president of Movimento per la vita, former MP), Gianfranco Amato (founder of Giuristi per la Vita), Massimo Gandolfini (neurosurgeon, member of the Neocatechumenal Way and spokesperson of Comitato Difendiamo i nostri figli), Alfredo Mantovano and Roberto De Mattei (Alleanza Cattolica), Francesco D’Agostino (Unione Giuristi Cattolici), Luca Volonté (former MP, director of Foundation Novae Terrae for the Natural Family) and Lucetta Scaraffia (historian, columnist at the Osservatore Romano).
13.In 2015, Famiglia Domani created the web page Osservatorio Gender (Observatory on Gender) aiming at informing parents on the dangers of “gender ideology”.
14.Mantovano was vice-minister of internal affairs from 2001 to 2011 and is now a member of the Centro. Introvigne has been appointed both by the Italian Government as the Italian delegate to OSCE to fight racism and other discriminations and by the Ministry of the Foreign Affairs as the coordinator of the National Observatory for Religion. Founder of the traditionalist think tank Fondazione Lepanto (Lepanto Foundation) and close to the Fronte Monarchico (Monarchic Front), De Mattei has been vice-president of the National Research Council. He was one of the first academics denouncing the spread of “gender theory” since 2008; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zarVJEQesjg (Accessed 20 September 2016). In 2011, De Mattei declared that the Roman Empire collapsed because of the “contagion of homosexuality and effeminacy”, see http://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2011/04/06/news/de_mattei_impero_romano_omosessuali-14561724/ (Accessed 20 September 2016).
15.In anti-gender blogs such as “No ai matrimoni gay in Italia” (No to gay marriage in Italy), gender is described as an ideology spreading paedophilia. The cases of child abuse by Catholic priests and the subsequent cover-ups by the Catholic hierarchy are never addressed in public debate.
16.On the Vatican’s misuses of scientific literature, see Fillod (2014).
17.The speakers were Mario Palmaro (one of the promoters of Giuristi per la Vita and Notizie Pro-Vita), Dina Nerozzi (Dale O’Leary’s translator), Chiara Atzori (a follower of Joseph Nicolosi’s theories) and Roberto de Mattei.
18.Di Tolve wrote a book meaningfully entitled Ero gay. A Medjugorje ho ritrovato me stesso (I was gay. I found myself in Medjugorje), introduced by scientist Tarcisio Mezzetti. In his text, Mezzetti describes Di Tolve’s account as an instrument to let “science and knowledge” triumph over “opinion and ignorance”.
19.Costanza Miriano and Mario Adinolfi are the authors of two anti-gender best sellers: Sposati e sii sottomessa (Marry and Be Submissed) and Voglio la mamma (I Want Mummy).
20.On the relationship between the Sentinelle and Alleanza Cattolica, see http://gayburg.blogspot.fr/2014/08/chi-e-il-proprietario-delle-Sentinelle.html. Accessed 20 September 2016.
21.The selection of books that demonstrators hold in their hands is supposed to be free, although members of the neo-fascist group Forza Nuova who participated at a vigil in Milan in December 2013 have been expulsed by the organizers because they chose books edited by Far-Right publishers. This event produced a break between the activists of Forza Nuova and the organizers of the vigil from Alleanza Cattolica. The former created a new group of sentinels explicitly claiming their Catholic positioning, the Sentinelle – Cattolici in Piedi (Standing Catholic Sentinels).
22.DIGOS is a special operational division of the Italian police (Polizia di Stato) charged with investigating sensitive cases involving terrorism, organized crime and serious offences.
23.On the leading role of the Committee, see De Guerre and Prearo (2016).
24.Massimo Gandolfini on 26 January 2016: http://video.repubblica.it/dossier/unioni-civili-stepchild-adoption-cirinna/gandolfini-family-day-macche-fanalino-di-coda-su-famiglia-l-italia-e-faro-di-civilta/226537/225818. Accessed 20 September 2016.
25.For a critical analysis unpacking the relationship between Europe and LGBTQ rights in time and space, see Ayoub and Paternotte (2014).
26.This nationalistic argument coexists with a strategy of involvement of Muslim personalities, such as Souad Sbai, president of the Associazione della Comunità Marocchina in Italia delle Donne (Association Moroccan Women in Italy) or Ben Mohamed Mohamed, president of the Associazione Culturale Islamica in Italia (Islamic Cultural Association in Italy), in anti-gender actions.
27.On 21 July 2015, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Italy violated the European Convention on Human Rights by not recognizing same-sex couples’ right to family life. In this ECtHR judgment – Oliari and Others v. Italy – the court imposed a positive obligation on Italy to offer legal alternatives to same-sex couples in the absence of same-sex marriage.
28.Interestingly, a televised intervention, the Minister of Internal Affairs and leader of the Nuovo Centro Destra, Angelino Alfano aligned himself with anti-gender discourse by saying he was proud of preventing an “anthropological revolution against nature”, see http://www.ansa.it/sito/notizie/politica/2016/02/25/alfano-no-a-rivoluzione-contro-natura_dda2bc48–5072–4286-b7c2–135ed490c3de.html. Accessed 20 September 2016.
29.See http://www.lastampa.it/2014/03/24/vaticaninsider/ita/news/bagnasco-genitori-non-fatevi-intimidire-dalla-dittatura-gender-3BXyGvNh2nyzTtsRVOS84N/pagina.html. Accessed 20 September 2016.
30.In a national context in which sexual difference feminism is still influent, feminism can be depicted by the essayist Giulia Galeotti as the “ally of the Catholic Church against gender” (Galeotti 2013). Galeotti’s text constitutes one of the Italian versions of the copious books reconstituting the origin and the development of what anti-gender actors call “gender ideology”. It is interesting to note how these publications present common references (Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, Monica [sic] Wittig, Judith Butler) and national peculiarities. More broadly, in anti-gender rhetoric, the label “gender ideology” operates as a pseudo-concept with three main functions: creating a unique enemy in deforming, unifying and delegitimizing different minister of internal affairs and claims, constituting a front of mobilization and impressing a wide political audience.
31.After the Family Day of January 2016, Giuseppe Vacca declared that “anti-gender” protest should not be considered reactionary because they combat the “nihilistic drifts menacing our civilization”. http://www.corriere.it/politica/16_febbraio_03/vacca-intervista-family-day-non-reazionario-b2415284-c9e8–11e5–83af-3e75cf16ed0a.shtml. Accessed 20 September 2016.
32.In this sense, it is interesting to notice that among the anti-gender groups we found the association “Nonni 2.0” (Grandparents 2.0), established in 2014. It gathers grandparents worried about what they call an “eduational emergency produced by gender”.
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