During the Anglo-American occupation of Italy (1943-54), a new type of illegal sex work made highlights in crime news and retained the attention of law enforcement, public opinion, and pop culture. The reference is to the segnorine, a neologism that gained currency to identify Italian women working outside the system of state controlled prostitution and selling sex to GIs.
Most of these ‘wandering’ prostitutes were concentrated in the cities hosting important Allied military bases, such as Naples, Rome, Livorno and Trieste. This gave visibility to a behavior that was considered ‘irregular’, and hence deviant. The segnorine were blamed for compromising the integrity of Italian pride, male honor and bloodline, while refusing to comply with bourgeois gender roles and regulationist standards. Being treated as a danger for public order, they were subjected to forms of collective violence and even internment. Above all, they were demonized for having intercourse or simply fraternizing with foreign soldiers, especially when African American.
Sex War-k focuses on the tropes and practices centered on the experience of the segnorine from a cultural history perspective, pointing out some specificities of the Italian case: the fact that clients were ‘allied enemies’; the fact that a number of them were ‘racial aliens’; the derogatory representation of prostitutes as internal migrants, coming from Southern Italy. I argue that the media hype surrounding the segnorine was the mirror of the contradictions that characterized the post-fascist transition. Democratic postwar reconstruction conflicted with sexist genderization and (post)colonial racism addressed to Black troops, as well as to the stigma associated with the meridionali. A gender/race/crime intersectional approach to prostitution shows a recovery narrative genre and a self-absolving discourse that acted below and above the nation, pushing those who had injured its honor out of the boundaries of the local and national community of ‘good Italians’.
Prostitution in wartime occupied countries has been studied above all in a bio-political perspective. Few studies have considered the history of ‘irregular’ sex workers as a substantial part of the post-war recasting of national identities. Despite its specifity, the Italian case has been paid little attention to. Sex War-K adopts a novel perspective, by consolidating a conceptual framework of the prostitution as a mirror of the contradictions of democratic reconstruction. The media hype, the political debate and even mob violence related to the relationships between the segnorine and black GIs are a perfect key for understanding the cultural aporias of the new order.
This project has three main objectives:
(1) to understand some historical roots of discrimination in post-WWII democracies;
(2) to explain how prostitution policies (mixing control, tolerance and repression) gave new impetus to racist-sexist tropes, derogatory stereotypes and national hostilities;
(3) to examine the influence of the Cold War in structuring this master narrative of deviancy.