Racialising the whore

Maha is a young woman in her early twenties, born in a village in northern Italy to Moroccan parents of Muslim belief. I met her when she had just completed her BA with a thesis that challenged the everyday portrayal of Islam as the threatening, backward, illiberal Other of Western countries.Footnote ⁹ ‘I wanted to go against the prejudice that all Muslims are terrorists, and that the Qur’an spurs terrorist acts’, she said defiantly, evincing frustration with the widespread Islamophobic attitudes in the country (Pew Research Centre 2014). At the time of the interview, she was looking at ways to transition from higher education to the labour market. In the meantime, she was continuing her work as an image girl in discos and at trade fairs, in which she had regularly started to perform after enrolling at university.Footnote ¹⁰

Back then, she recalled, her decision to leave home to study at a distant but prestigious Italian university had been the subject of a family dispute. ‘I was going too far away, [I am the] first daughter, a girl going out, [in a city of] millions of people compared to the few thousands living here…’ she evoked sympathetically. Financial considerations also occupied a central position in her parents’ concerns, as they ‘had a house loan to pay, four kids, and taxes are high’. They nonetheless agreed to pay for the costs of Maha’s studies (tuition fees and books) while living costs were to be on her account – although ‘the second year, as I was paying a lot, she [the mother] stopped paying for books.’ Maha, therefore, sought a job ‘that would put me in a position to attend university and study, but at the same time, not be too demanding, like a part time [job]’, she explained, ‘because it would have been stupid not to attend classes in order to work.’ The job of the image girl seemed to her a valuable option, especially in light of its cost-effectiveness. ‘I was earning €50 from midnight to 4am, so it was a lower pay than in my hometown’,Footnote ¹¹ she said recalling her early days at the bottom of the night entertainment industry in the town in which she had newly settled.

‘Do people really expect foreign women to be “easier” than Italians?’ I asked her, surprised. ‘Yes, of course. Sure’, she replied, seemingly puzzled at my naivety, ‘you are foreign, so they automatically think that you’re here without your parents, first and foremost that you’re here to earn your living and that therefore you earn it in any possible, conceivable way.’

Maha’s words aptly illuminate how her interaction with male customers in Italy is shaped by their expectation that a ‘foreign’ woman is more readily sexually available than a native Italian. The roots of their gendered and racialised assumption (Brah Reference Brah1993), I contend, are twofold. The first is that in a country where migrant women are widely represented as either sex, domestic or care workers (García-Peña Reference García-Peña2013, 151), women using their erotic capital as an economic resource are likely automatically classified amongst the first. The second is that away from patriarchal surveillance over their body and sexuality, women are ‘naturally’ promiscuous. Although Maha is neither a migrant nor a foreign woman, she is nonetheless viewed as one under this racialised male gaze, contributing to her self-presentation as ‘foreign’. More broadly, her words foreground the ways in which sexuality gets racialised and race is sexualised (Stoler Reference Stoler1995; Mosse Reference Mosse1996). As I discuss next, this racialisation of sexuality is embedded in the processes underpinning the making of Italy into a nation state and an empire.

Respectability and its others

From Edward Said’s pioneering Orientalism (Reference Said1979) onwards, postcolonial scholarship has amply shown how race and sexuality have been deployed as two mutually constituting categories within discourses underpinning Western knowledge of, and rule over, people living in distant lands. Long before the apex of Western imperialism, the ‘uncertain continents – Africa, the Americas, Asia – were figured in European lore as libidinously eroticised’ (McClintock Reference McClintock1995, 22), and their inhabitants ‘as erotic and exotic, carnal and carnival’ (Nagel Reference Nagel2003, 200). For centuries, Europeans portrayed black African people using the trope of excessive sexuality (Nagel Reference Nagel2003, 97; McClintock Reference McClintock1995, 113). In the nineteenth century, this racial and sexual difference was epitomised by the ‘Hottentot Venus’, alias for Saartjie Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman who was taken from the British Cape Colony to London and Paris to publicly display her purportedly ‘abnormal’ sexual organs (Magubane Reference Magubane2011, 46; Gilman Reference Gilman1985, 213). Nineteenth- century evolutionary social theory theorised humankind’s teleological progression from ‘primitive promiscuity, marriage by capture, and exotic forms of sexual abuse’ to the perfection of Victorian sexual morality, representing the self-ascribed apex of civilisation (Lyons and Lyons Reference Lyons and Lyons2011, 68). Temporality was racialised with ‘racial hierarchy and historical progress [becoming] the faits accomplis of nature’ (McClintock Reference McClintock1995, 38).Footnote ¹² It was also gendered as criminal anthropologists theorised women’s expression of sexuality as a sign of their incomplete evolution and/or natural born deviance (Lombroso and Ferrero Reference Lombroso and Ferrero1903).

This intimate entanglement of power, race and sexuality analogously characterised the orientalist gaze of north Western European travellers on the southern lands of the continent (Moe Reference Moe2002). A prime destination for the young, upper-class men undertaking the Grand Tour during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, ‘Italy’ was imagined and consumed as a land of ‘warm weather, cheap wine, relaxed company and sex’Footnote ¹³ (Gundle Reference Gundle2007, 2). The southern regions of the peninsula were particularly perceived as primitive and picturesque, blending ‘feudal residues, sloth, and squalor’ with ‘quaint peasants, rustic traditions, and exotica’ (Moe Reference Moe2002, 3). The racialised sexualisation of its people similarly featured in the accounts of foreign diplomats and travellers writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Naples and the south of Italy were, for example, portrayed as a ‘land of sensuality, ignorance, barbarity, decay, corruption’ (Moe Reference Moe1992, 78).

Northern liberal elites’ imagination of ‘Italy’ was deeply influenced by this gaze (Moe Reference Moe2002) which used sexuality to position people differently within racialised hierarchies of rule. As a signifier, sexuality was further inflected by class, in a cultural context characterised by the hegemony of the middle-class ideology of respectability (Mosse Reference Mosse1996). The intersection of gender, race and class in the othering processes underpinning the making of ‘Italy’ emerge clearly from some extracts of the correspondence between the political and military officials engaged in the process of liberation, or conquest, of the South. For example, in a letter to Cavour, the newly appointed commissioner of Naples, Luigi Carlo Farini, wrote that the city was the ‘capital of sloth and of the prostitution of every sex, of every class’.Footnote ¹⁴ His contrasting tacit subtext is the orderly organisation of prostitution of only one sex (the female) and class (the destitute), which is a central tenet of the material scaffolding of respectability.Footnote ¹⁵ By characterising the people under his rule as unruly sexually, Farini affirmed northern liberal elites’ self-ascribed legitimacy to rule the country-to-be based on the tautological relation between their moral superiority and modernity. In another extract, which appears in a widely quoted letter of his to Cavour, he compares the South to ‘Africa’.Footnote ¹⁶ Arguably, though, it is his horror for southern women’s active participation in the resistance to the nation-in-making that best encapsulates the intimate entanglement of power, race and sexuality at the core of Italian nationalism:

Feminist and postcolonial scholars have abundantly shown how ‘Woman’ has been historically used to signify the ‘Nation’ within national liberation and nation building projects (see for example Yuval-Davis Reference Yuval-Davis1997; Kandiyoti Reference Kandiyoti1991). At a time when women’s use of space signified their class status, with respectable women constrained within the home and ‘“women of the streets” [becoming] a euphemism for prostitution’ (Skeggs Reference Skeggs1997, 46–47), Farini’s representation of southern women as Amazons and agents of emasculation epitomises his view of southern people as primitively promiscuous. Indeed, women’s visible defiance of the norms constraining their sexuality and mobility and their anti-national agency prompted their labelling as ‘whores’, at a time when white women prostitutes were considered ‘the metropolitan analogue of African promiscuity’ (McClintock Reference McClintock1995, 56).Footnote ¹⁸ In the early years after the birth of the Kingdom of Italy, brigantesse (female brigands) struggling against a North-driven process of unification shoulder-to-shoulder with men were labelled ‘cagne [bitches] and prostitutes’ (Cutrufelli Reference Cutrufelli1974, 163), suggesting their distance from humanity and especially from its middle-class ideal.

There is copious scholarship showing how in the early decades of the Kingdom of Italy the justification of northern liberal elites’ rule over the South was discursively underpinned by a biological notion of race (see for example Teti Reference Teti1993; De Francesco Reference De Francesco2012). Northern Italians’ lineage was linked to a white Euro-Asiatic population whose purportedly ‘cold psychology, [and] rarely excitable self’ made them fitter for modernity, progress and rule. Conversely, southern Italians’ genealogy was linked to black African people, which reportedly made them ‘“passionate”, individualistic, [and] with scant morality and organisational spirit’ (Alfredo Niceforo cited in Teti Reference Teti1993, 16). This racialised fracture at the core of Italian nationalism was temporarily blanketed by Fascism (De Francesco Reference De Francesco2012, 10), and the ‘blackness’ of southern people projected outside the borders of the nation, onto the colonies (Giuliani and Lombardi-Diop Reference Giuliani and Lombardi-Diop2013, 24).

Differently from the severe discipline of sexuality enforced by most Western countries in their colonies (see for example Stoler Reference Stoler1997; Hyam Reference Hyam1998), in the Italian colonies it was only loosely regulated, and Italian male settlers widely enjoyed intimate relations with native women.Footnote ¹⁹ Their desiring gaze, nonetheless, was informed by and reproduced a taxonomy of race according to which bodies closer to the white ‘race’ were considered more desirable than black bodies by virtue of their supposed proximity to Western civilisation and modernity.Footnote ²⁰ Conversely, Italian women, whether in the metropolis or in the colonies, were entrusted with the cultural and biological reproduction (Yuval-Davis Reference Yuval-Davis1997) of the white nation, whose respectability they were expected to embody based on a severe legal discipline of their sexuality (Giuliani and Lombardi-Diop Reference Giuliani and Lombardi-Diop2013, 47).

A constitutive part of Italian nationalism and imperialism, these racialised hierarchies of feminine dis/respectability continue to reverberate in contemporary Italy. For example, discussing the racism experienced by black African migrant women in Turin in the 1990s, Merrill observed that they were broadly culturally classified ‘as sexually available or promiscuous’ based on their ‘phenotypical distinctions or dark-coloured skin, foreign clothing, and hairstyles’ and their single migrant status (2006, 5–6). Both these factors inform the male gaze under which Maha negotiates her agency at work. In the previous section, I suggested that her perceived foreign status and supposedly consequent freedom from parental surveillance prompt men’s expectations that she is sexually available, and in the next I will show how Maha’s skin colour produces similar effects.

Several scholars have discussed the contemporary productivity of this racialised ‘whore stigma’ (Pheterson Reference Pheterson1993), showing how a woman’s race affects her positioning within binaries juxtaposing naivety and unscrupulousness, pity and contempt, victimhood and blame. Hence, the typically feminine, respectable task of caring for others (Skeggs Reference Skeggs1997) becomes a lure and a scene of deception when performed for money by ‘foreign’ women (i.e. as domestic or care workers), that media portray as greedy, home-wrecking female predators in disguise (Cvajner Reference Cvajner2011, 357). Mainstream representations of the women involved in the sex ‘scandals’ surrounding Prime Minister Berlusconi during the last years of his rule (Dominijanni Reference Dominijanni2014) were analogously inflected by race. Indeed, Italian women were generally ‘absolved’ for reasons ranging from ingenuousness to economic need, whereas migrant women were ‘portrayed as social climbers, ready to “sell themselves” for money and success’ (Giuliani and Lombardi-Diop Reference Giuliani and Lombardi-Diop2013, 135). This racialisation of respectability was reproduced in the appeal for the women’s mobilisation that took to the streets on 13 February 2011 to demonstrate in the name of their ‘dignity’ (Gribaldo and Zapperi Reference Gribaldo and Zapperi2012). Women using their sexuality for personal gain were depicted as vectors of social and national pollution (SNOQ 2011) while contextually implicitly qualifying as chaste the feminine subject worthy of the Nation.

Shading the Nation

‘People don’t believe that I speak Italian so well’, said Maha as she continued recounting her experiences of racialisation at work.

Maha’s self-definition as ‘objectively foreign’ – notwithstanding her Italian citizenship – appears to convey the interiorisation of her status as an Other to the nation, which she perceives as marked by her skin colour. Her alienation is reproduced under and through the racialised gaze that men project on her, reflecting how Italian settler colonialism and imperialism imagined and consumed Arab and African women as primitively sexual and available. For Maha, her ‘foreign’ status therefore constitutes an everyday source of male innuendos, as well as what I term a ‘recognition failure’. Psychoanalysis considers recognition to be central to the constitution of the subject as it rests on the intersubjective acknowledgement of his/her separation and autonomy (Benjamin Reference Benjamin1990). Recognition also holds normative significance as subjects perceive one another as bearers of some shared qualities, attributes and/or status (Iser Reference Iser2013). A recognition failure, therefore, describes a condition in which this mutuality fails, which in the case of Maha leads to her classification as ‘foreign’ for failing to reflect and reproduce the nation’s normative whiteness (Giuliani Reference Giuliani2015).Footnote ²¹

Italy’s self-imagination as a white nation came to the fore with the 1996 victory of the iconic ‘Miss Italy’ beauty pageant by a black woman.Footnote ²² The crowning of Dominican-born, naturalised Italian Denny Méndez appeared as a statement of the changing demographics of a country with a net migration rate on the rise. The ensuing row (Scotti Reference Scotti1996; Bohlen Reference Bohlen1996) revealed the extent to which this event symbolically unsettled the borders of the nation.

For Bob Krieger, an Egypt-born Italian fashion photographer and jury member, Denny Méndez was unfit to be Italy’s beauty queen because she was not ‘Mediterranean’ (quoted in Ardizzoni Reference Ardizzoni2005, 510). Yet, although his words suggest the interchangeability of the ‘Mediterranean’ and ‘Italian’ adjectives as qualifiers of national feminine beauty, the naturalisation of this equation is a relatively recent phenomenon. For decades after the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy, the figure of the dark-eyed, dark-haired and olive-skinned woman signified, in contrast, the primitive otherness of the South (Gundle Reference Gundle2007, 33). It was only in the context of the Fascist regime’s attempts to align the unity of the Italian people behind its imperial ambitions that Mediterraneity became both the canon and the cradle of Italianness (Giuliani 2013, 24). After the collapse of Fascism, the conflation between Mediterranean and Italian feminine beauty was reified in the gaze of American and British audiences, who consumed Italian movie stars as ‘exotic, fiery, passionate’, and ‘unspoilt’ by modernity (Gundle Reference Gundle2007, 142). By the 1990s, the primitive hyper-sexuality which had long signified the backwardness of the South became the trademark of ‘Made in Italy’ products (Gundle Reference Gundle2007, 239) in a global marketplace increasingly characterised by commodities’ infusion with ‘orgasmic’ value (Preciado Reference Preciado2013).Footnote ²³

Too light to be considered ‘black’ in the country of her birth (García-Peña Reference García-Peña2013, 139), the skin colour of Denny Méndez was deemed too dark to represent Italy and signalled her status as a ‘space invader’ (Puwar Reference Puwar2004). As the words of TV producer, journalist and pageant judge Enrico Mentana suggested, Méndez belonged to the underdeveloped places where white Western tourists went to consume the sensuality of racialised others (Nagel Reference Nagel2003, 19). ‘“She is exotic”, he said, “like the women whom Italians who spend their vacations in Cuba find attractive”’ (quoted in Ardizzoni Reference Ardizzoni2005, 510). In a country where migrant women were represented as either sex, domestic or care workers, Méndez’s victory also conveyed a carnival-like subversion of hierarchies of power. It, indeed, suggested that ‘Italy could be represented by the marginal, the poor, the prostitute, the foreigner, and the object of fear and desire, in short, by those who should remain outside the nation’ (García-Peña Reference García-Peña2013, 151).

The values of race

‘You always have to manage the thing and it is not easy,’ Maha said with reference to male innuendos at work.

Rather than just implying her status as a space invader, as she fails to be recognised as a proper citizen of the country where she was born and raised, male sexual projections on Maha’s racialised body can also put her livelihood in jeopardy. Nevertheless, as I show below, these can also ambivalently function as a source of orgasmic value which women can mobilise and consume. Indeed, if a commodity’s value in contemporary capitalism (also) rests on its capacity to generate pleasure, a woman’s erotic capital might engender a pathway for her upward social mobility. ‘Not to mention after Ruby’s scandal!’ continued Maha with a slightly flirty tone, ‘I am Moroccan and she is Moroccan. You can’t imagine: the end of the world! Scandal! People stopped me in via del Corso [and asked]: ‘Ruby? Are you Ruby?!’

Ruby Rubacuori (Ruby the Heart Stealer), the alias of Karima El Mahrough, was the young woman of Moroccan origin from whom, in 2010, the then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi allegedly bought sexual services when she was still underage, resulting in the opening of the judicial investigation dubbed ‘Rubygate’.Footnote ²⁴ At the time, both mainstream media and feminist and leftist intellectuals deployed racialised and sexualised metaphors to disparage politician and citizen Berlusconi. The ‘sultan’ epithet (see for example: Melandri Reference Melandri2011; Dominijanni Reference Dominijanni2011; Casarini Reference Casarini2011) symbolically positioned him in a premodern, undemocratic elsewhere, where male leaders dispose of a multitude of women secluded in their harem.Footnote ²⁵ El Mahrough’s Arab origins, in this context, appeared as the quintessential embodiment of the prime minister’s racialised desire. A young woman who had run away from her humble family, El Mahrough was turned by the mainstream media’s voyeuristic attentioninto a celebrity in a cultural context that glamourises women’s confident display of sexuality (McNair Reference McNair2002; Levy Reference Levy2006; Attwood Reference Attwood2009; Gill Reference Gill2009). For Maha, then, to be mistaken for El Mahrough partly constitutes an implicit acknowledgement of the value of her erotic capital, which holds the promise of standing out from an anonymous crowd. Indeed, the very possibility of this identity swap depended on her presence, as she coquettishly hinted, on the ultimate shopping street of Italy’s fashion capital. Arguably, she consumed the – albeit fleeting and ambivalent – pleasure of embodying a woman whose sexuality attracted power and contempt, celebrity and stigma, pleasure and pain.

Maha’s experience of her racialisation is therefore ambivalently shaped at the intersection between the national imagination and transnational cultural and commodity flows. The tensions marked on her female body illuminate how women’s sexuality continues to operate as a device of othering which reproduces the boundaries of the nation through the desiring male gaze. The effects of these othering processes, however, vary on the basis of women’s different social location, as inflected by race and class. To illuminate these fractures, I conclude by contrasting Maha’s experience with that of Monica, an Italian woman of approximately the same age as Maha, who similarly reported being frequently mistaken for a ‘foreign’ woman while working as an image girl in discos.

Differently from Maha, Monica was born Italian; both her parents hailed from the same region where they resided, in northern Italy. When I interviewed her, she had already long been in a white-collar job. Unlike most of her peers, after reaching the age of majority she did not go into higher education. She preferred instead to earn her economic independence and moved out of her parental home located in the small village of her birth. ‘You know, I had the typical controlling father who until I was 18 years old did not let me do a fucking thing’, she recounted bitterly. ‘He never came to pick me up from a disco, and he did not want me to go with strangers, so: “you don’t go”.’ As soon as she found a job in the city, Monica left home and could finally fulfil her desire to go out and have fun. ‘When I reached my twenties, I went crazy! But even now I am still fond of going out dancing, doing [stuff], meeting people…’ she said, her palpable enthusiasm revealing the lasting relief of having escaped her father’s surveillance.

With a secure job, Monica did not have to seek opportunities to earn additional income. However, she bumped into the opportunity to work as an image girl, as she was headhunted by the managers of the beach resort disco she frequently attended. ‘You know, there were people sitting, and I would go and break their balls [saying] “come on guys, let’s go dancing!” and this is how I made myself known’, she recalled. The boundaries between consumption and work blurred in Monica’s words, as she described that she worked ‘to have fun, not to earn money. I drank for free […] when I go there I don’t spend a penny’. On a handful of occasions, though, she tried working in more formal settings together with a friend who worked professionally as an image girl in upscale discos. ‘We ended up with the typical entrepreneur Milanese in his fifties, right?’ said Monica, evoking one of these nights. ‘All very confident, because he did, he went … and I felt very uneasy: what do you talk about with such a person? It’s hard, hey?!’ She recounted shadowing her friend in the conversation with the customer, at whose table sat, alongside them, four other women:

‘But did Italian men say that as well?’ I asked her, puzzled, wondering how a woman who in my eyes embodied the quintessential Italian/Mediterranean beauty – shapely, with brown eyes, long brown hair and olive skin – could fail to be recognised as such. ‘Yes! Both the girls [her peers] and the people I met. I spent a whole summer being told “you’re Brazilian, you’re Brazilian”,’ she said bursting into a cheerful laughter, ‘and I don’t know, what the fuck can I have of Brazilian? My arse?!’ she continued, giggling.

Monica’s labelling as a ‘foreign’ woman is analogous to Maha’s, but it appears to acquire a different meaning with her, for reasons that reflect her different social location. Inasmuch as race and sexuality mutually constitute one another, Monica’s racialisation reflects her audience’s perception of her as a highly sexually desirable woman. Within heteronormativity, however, women’s sexuality ambivalently draws to them male desire and contempt, the obverse of their erotic capital being the whore stigma. This ambivalence emerged clearly in the case of Maha: her perceived status as a ‘foreign’ woman attracted male expectations that she was, as she relayed, ‘a whore’, contextually reproducing her alienation from a nation who gave her citizenship only upon reaching the age of majority, and which still uneasily accommodates religious plurality. Differently, Monica appeared to embrace the label of the ‘foreign’ woman. Confident of belonging to the nation where she, her parents, and their ancestors going back to time immemorial were born, her words did not indicate any pain at not being recognised as an Italian citizen. Rather, her laughter suggests that she found the label of the ‘Brazilian’ woman flattering. On the one hand, this confirmed that her sexual desirability symbolically exceeded the borders of the nation. She was perceived to belong to an exotic elsewhere: there, where native men burn with desire for their fellow countrywomen,Footnote ²⁶ and to where global tourists travel to consume their desire for racialised otherness (Brennan Reference Brennan2004; Nagel Reference Nagel2003). In a context where mixed-racialness circulates, as she relayed, as a valuable commodity, Monica therefore appeared to consume her racialisation as a confirmation or a boost to her sexual desirability. On the other hand, her status as a natural born Italian, and awareness that her livelihood did not depend on the exchange of her erotic capital, possibly tamed the stigmatising assumptions of sexual availability that Maha reported experiencing regularly at work.