The re/production of a (white) people: confronting Italian nationalist populism as a gender and race issue

Abstract

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to inquiry nationalistic populism in Italy, using an intersectional perspective - feminist and postcolonial - and proposing some possible articulations between feminist and racial struggles as a response to the contemporary advance of the racist and misogynist far-right. Using the theoretical frame of Critical Studies on Whiteness (Giuliani 2013), the hypothesis is that this specific articulation of racism and sexism represents the basis of affirmation of alt right hegemony in contemporary Italy – where the political and cultural context is characterized by a capillary diffusion of racial, misogynist, homophobic and xenophobic feelings. The text focuses on the emotional dimension of nationalist populism (Ahmed 2004): this theoretical framework is necessary for the analysis of the history of Italian nationalism as a phenomenon based on the obsession with the production and maintenance of the whiteness of the Italian people (Petrovich Njegosh 2012). The last part of the present paper is dedicated to the examples of articulation between feminist and racial/postcolonial struggles in contemporary Italy, focusing on the case of the feminist “vandalization” of colonialist monuments, i.e., the statue of Indro Montanelli in Milan, on the 8th of March 2019 (Panico 2019).