The Coercion and Confinement of LGBT People in Psychiatric Hospitals in Italy during the Fascist Regime, 1922 – 1943
When:
—
Venue:
Online
Gabriella Romano (Birkbeck, University of London)
Please reserve your place via this link (https://dev.history.ac.uk/events/coercion-and-confinement-lgbt-people-psychiatric-hospitals-italy-during-fascist-regime-1922)
I will talk about the question of the repression of LGBT people through psychiatry during Fascism in Italy, a subject that has not been investigated until now. Based on archival record of patients, doctors and fascist authorities, my research attempts to reconstruct the intricate behind-the-scenes dialogue, to document one of the ways in which the regime repressed LGBT lives. It also sheds light on psychiatry during the fascist regime, a subject rarely studied, while it reconstructs the lives of some LGBT people under Mussolini’s dictatorship through asylum documentation, seldom analysed from this perspective, and psychiatric journals’ articles.
Unexpectedly, while psychiatric theory and fascist propaganda went hand in hand in pathologising homosexuality, asylum practitioners quietly disobeyed national directives, refused to treat homosexual patients as dangerous patients, often even sided with them and challenged homophobic relatives and authorities’ statements. Their attitudes are an apt example of the gap between coercion and consent, obedience and resistance, which is one of the key issues to understand how Fascism operated.
Gabriella Romano completed a PhD in History at Birkbeck College, University of London, on the pathologisation of homosexuality in fascist Italy. Her research was fully funded by the Wellcome Trust. Her MRes dissertation was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009, and in Italian translation, later the same year (The Pathologisation of Homosexuality in Fascist Italy. The Case of G., Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2019; Italian translation: ETS, Pisa 2019).
Among her publications, several focus on LGBT history and issues: I Sapori della Seduzione (on Italian lesbians' lives in the Fifties),Ombrecorte, Verona 2006; "Ritratti di Donne in Interni", in Milletti N. and Passerini L. eds., Fuori della Norma, Storie lesbiche nell'Italia del primo Novecento, Rosenberg & Sellier, Torino 2007; Il mio nome è Lucy, (based on her interview with 85-year-old Italian MtoF transexual, Lucy, who survived the fascist regime and deportation to Dachau), Donzelli, Roma 2009; La Tarantina e la sua "dolce vita" (based on an interview to a Neapolitan "femminiello" who lived in Rome in the Fifties) Ombrecorte, Verona 2013. As an independent film-maker she focused on oral history projects, mainly on homosexuality in Italy during Fascism ("Nietta's Diary", 1996, "The Day Before Yesterday", 2002, "To Remember", 2003, “Being Lucy”, 2011, “Stolen Kisses”, in co-direction with F. Laurenti, 2020). Her documentary, “Violet Gibson. La donna che tentò di uccidere il Duce” (2009), focussed on the Irish woman who tried to kill Mussolini in 1926.
Contact name:
Katy Pettit