PhD thesis defence by Brian O'Connor
This thesis explores the motivations, worldview and praxis of queer cisgender antimafia activists in contemporary Sicily and the Italian peninsula. To address this lacuna, I detail five cases of individual activism spanning 1968 to December 2024, and briefly describe the involvement of the Italian queer / LGBTQIA+ rights group Arcigay within the antimafia movement at the institutional level.
The thesis demonstrates that queer people have been active in the contemporary antimafia movement from as early as the 1970s, and that activists’ sexual identities played an important role not only in understanding the mafia and their opposition to it. There, I show that while the activists studied uniformly described the mafia as homophobic or approximating homophobia in its repressiveness, not all activists were motivated to confront the mafia on these grounds. Instead, I show that the male activists studied understood their sexuality as being incompatible with the mafia, either because it was an innately revolutionary quality or because it was fundamentally inimical to the mafia’s worldview. I further note a common understanding of the mafia as trapped and/or repressed among the male activists studied, which I argue may reflect queer experiences of leaving the ‘closet’ and rejecting societal pressure to conform. At the institutional level, the thesis shows that the southern branches of Arcigay pushed the national executive to more actively participate in the antimafia movement in the 2000s. The thesis also shows that institutional queer antimafia mafia activism may be motivated by i) queer grievances against homophobic mafia persecution, ii) an understanding of the mafia as grotesque, iii) a sense of queer solidarity with mafia victims based on a shared experience of oppression, and iv) the opportunity to build alliances with other groups engaged in the struggle against the mafia.
Besides this larger gap in the literature, the thesis addresses several other gaps. Firstly, the case study on Nino Gennaro explores antimafia activism in Sicily between the emergence of the mass movement in the early 1980s and the demise of the 'Movimento Contadino' in the 1960s. Therein, I highlight the fascinating intersections between Gennaro’s antimafia activism, his sexuality, the social upheaval of the late 1960s and 1970s in Italy, and the geopolitics of the Cold War. Secondly, by placing activists’ life histories at the centre of analysis, the thesis challenges the antimafia literature’s tendency to neglect individuals as a unit of analysis and overlook the motivations of activists who were not murdered or bereaved by the mafia. Comparing these cases, I argue that the scholarship’s focus on the key episodes of mafia violence in the 1980s and 1990s as triggers of antimafia activism is accurate, but shows that this moral outrage can coexist with other motivations at the individual level. These include a repulsion at the mafia’s grotesque nature more generally, a deep concern about the mafia’s corruption and subversion of Sicilian and Italian society, activists’ broader sociopolitical concerns and allegiances, and activists’ own personal circumstances.
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