The Sexual/Political

Front matter

FREUD WITH MARX, FANON, FOUCAULT

The Sexual/P olitical engages with contemporary political issues in sexuality through a survey of modern philosophy, psychoanalytic thought, 20th-century political theory, and more recent queer philosophies.

The book investigates how the sexual has perturbed philosophical, political, and psychoanalytic thought and how this has fed into discrimination against the LGBTQI community. It analyses the social stigmas applied to public and private sexual acts and the psychopolitical processes leading to the prevalence of neo-fascist populism in Italy and the world. Tracing the history of sexuality through Freud, Marx, Fanon, and Foucault, among many others, Bernini considers why the sexual has always been an exceptionally difficult object to consider in political theory.

Contents

Figure 1: Photography by Michele Longo Translator’s Preface

Introduction to the English Edition Prologue: Merde alors!

PART I Freud 1 The Pig Roast 1.1 The Curse of the Ubermensch 45 1.2. Crimina Carnis Contra Naturam 48 1.3 The Political Body in the Boudoir 50 2 Feel Your Way with Freud 2.1 To Do Justice 61 2.2 The Phases of (Hetero)Sexual Development 64 2.3 The Perverse Sexual, or the Drive 68 3 Sigmund on the Couch

PART II With Marx, Fanon, Foucault

4.1 Bodies in Alliance without Sex 114 4.2 The (Hetero)Sexual Revolution 119 4.3 Hedonistic Resistances 126

5.1 In the Name of Anna 147 5.2 Elements of a Pansexual Critique 152 5.3. The Golden Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge 160

6.1 Foucault without Organs 182 6.2 Bastardized Space 190 6.3 Caliban’s Phallus 194

Epilogue: Hyenas in the Sauna

Bibliography Index

248 266

Source: Photography by Michele Longo.

Translator’s Preface

The title of this text, The Sexual/Political, may strike English-speaking readers as unusual. The terms “sexual” and “political” are typically used as adjectives, while here they are joined together by a definite article into a singular nominal form. Indeed, even the original Italian title, I/ sessuale politico, sounds strange in everyday Italian. In its common use, politico can be used in two principal ways: (1) as an adjective signifying a relation to politics, the art of governance, management of the state, or the administration of public life in general and (2) as a noun indicating the complex of social life and its tacit rules, the public sphere, or more simply a person who does politics—a politician. Meanwhile, in ordinary Italian usage, sessuale is resolutely an adjective denoting that which regards biological, physiological, psychological, and behavioral characteristics, processes, and activities as they relate to sex (however capaciously defined).

Because of this grammatical dilemma, I used “sexual/political” as a placeholder title until I could find a better solution. In the end, this turned out to be a fortuitous decision. Under its definitions of “sexual, adj.” (in English the substantive form of “sexual” exists, but it is a biological term referring to an organism that holds the capacity for reproduction set in contrast to terms like “asexual,” “parthenogenetic,” or “vegetative”), the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists a series of compound terms that includes the “sexual-political” as an adjective “of, relating to, or concerning sexual politics.” Indeed, early in the process of translation, I had thought to use “Sexual Politics” itself as a title—however this felt too close to a mode of thinking about the politics of sexuality that grew prominent in the late 1960s through the 1980s." In her by now classic text of that generation of feminist scholarship, Sexual Politics, Kate Millett uses politics in a broad yet still somewhat narrow sense to refer to “power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another.”? Her use of sexual as linked to politics refers less to sexual acts than to sex as a category of gender (indeed, her study is a classic because it is one of the first widely read studies to argue that sexual difference is socially constructed and that “biological sex” and “gender identification” are distinct phenomena),

Translators Preface xi whereby the relation between “males” and “females” is one of dominance and subordinance.

To my surprise, the OED notes that the first time “sexual-political” appears as a hyphenated pair in English is in Millett’s study. She uses it in her chapter “Sexual Revolution” where she includes a digression while discussing Friedrich Engels’s and Johann Jakob Bachofen’s respective theories of the historical evolution of the patriarchal social order. In her view, Engels and his sources—one of which is Bachofen’s study of ancient matriarchal societies (Mutterrecht, or “Mother Right” )—fail to adequately account for the genesis of the patriarchy as a dominant sociopolitical structure, which he views as primarily arising out of “sexual associations” (e.g. from promiscuity and group marriages to pairing and monogamous marriage). Millett then turns toa reading of Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy, the Oresteia, which Bachofen uses to discuss the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy as based in the knowledge of paternity and patrilineage. She writes:

Realizing the importance of the cause for this shift or change in the character of sexual association, realizing too the important role of early religion in connection with sexuality, Bachofen looked to myth and literature for evidence of how early society construed biological events in terms one might call sexual-political.*

Here she notes that Bachofen uses the Oresteia as evidence for the process of making the biological event of reproduction into a socio-historical event that inaugurates the sexual-political, by which she means “sexual politics,” or the hierarchical socio-cultural power dynamics conditioned by gender. Curious about the logical leap that he takes in making this claim, she notes further that both Bachofen and Engels claim that women allowed for this instantiation of their subjection because they sought relief from the burden of sexuality. In this way, she observes that both the “matriarchal school” of historians, which includes Bachofen and Engels, and the “patriarchal school”* were “repelled or made uneasy by the prospect of unregulated sexual activity.”°

Part of what made translating the title The Sexual/Political a challenge was because Bernini’s argument is not necessarily about the political arrangement that forms in relation to gender hierarchies or sexual activity. Instead, he explicates this dark-sided aspect of sexual life—digging into the philosophical roots of what incites in both these patriarchal and matriarchal schools an aversion to the idea of unregulated sexual activity—the unbridling of a wild region of the human that borders on the inhuman that is the sexual. The Sexual/Political then, joined with a / and a definite article, does not refer to the more broad-based category of “sexual politics.” It is the fusion of two terms that have complex philosophical antecedents: the “sexual,” which comes from Leo Bersani’s reading of Jean Laplanche’s xii Translator’s Preface re-reading of Freud, and the “political,” which can be recognized in German political philosopher Carl Schmitt’s writing on the “concept of the political.”

Laplanche conceptualizes the “sexual” as the “enlarged” theory of sexuality that emerges in Freud’s writing firmly rooted in, but not reducible to, his original theses on infantile sexuality. The term itself is a direct citation of the original German that Freud uses, Sexual, which often appears as an adjective linked to a noun like in Sexualtheorie (sexual theory), instead of the contemporary French spelling, le sexuel. It is difficult in English to grasp the significance of Laplanche’s neologism because of the linguistic context of this original movement: using le sexual in French contrasts with the more everyday French use of le sexuel, while in English, the sexual is orthographically identical to Freud’s German, thus obscuring its theoretical implications. Laplanche’s English translators have attempted to resolve this issue by italicizing sexual and indicating that the term should be pronounced with an elongated “a” sound—‘“ahl.”° I have not carried over this italicization in large part because while Bernini’s use of “sexual” originates with Laplanche, it is not reducible to it.

Here Bernini’s reading of Freud begins with the moments in his writing on sexuality where he hits a wall in understanding: Freud is ever returning to the question of sexuality, the problems associated with the telos of reproductive instinct and the disturbances that continue to come out in the sexual lives of his patients or in case studies. The problem of how the human undergoes sexual excitation (is it an instinct that begins from within? is it a force that arrives from without?) remains obscure for Freud. This confusion is what Laplanche calls the sexual: it is what evades rationality in sexuality, what contests the teleological sense of reproduction, and with them both the functional and evolutionary theories of sexuality. Part and parcel of this definition of the sexual is Freud’s notion of Trieb, or drive, which was mistranslated in the original English version of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by James Strachey as “instinct.” The drive is a synonym for the sexual. Laplanche notes that the drive differs from the instinct not on the level of the somatic vs the psychic; rather, the drive is acquired while instinct is innate. Bernini takes this one step further to demonstrate that “the sexual drive grafts onto the sexual instinct and remains implanted on the surface of the body.” Thus, borrowing Gilbert Simondon’s term, he argues that Freud’s conception of sexuality does not rest within an individual, but is “transindividual,” whereby it is implanted onto the body through touch during infancy.

What then of the second part of the title pair—political? In part, the political aspect comes from queer theorist Bersani’s observation in Homos, which also serves as the epigraph to this book, that the category of queerness seems to be “an emphasis on the inextricability of the sexual and the political,” yet more often than not the sexual aspect is removed, or foreclosed, from writing on queerness. The foreclosure of the sexual, the drive, points to a problem in political philosophy precisely because it is an antisocial force (this is as true for Bersani as it is for his fellow “anti-social”

Translator’s Preface xiii queer theorist Lee Edelman, as it is for Hobbes and Kant, who Bernini discusses in the first chapter) that is also necessarily enmeshed in the social. The sexual is therefore political because it is unpolitical. As Bernini writes in Chapter 6: “The sexual [...] is one of the causes of civilization’s discontents, which, despite all the efforts that can be made in the attempt to repress it, is repeatedly destined to disturb civilization.” Here the reference is Freud again, but a Freud who Bernini reads within a lineage of political philosophers, from Hobbes to Carl Schmitt. Indeed, Schmitt makes a prevalent appearance in Chapter 3 in comparison to Freud. Both of them, Bernini argues, overcome Hobbes’s pessimistic categorization of humans as “wolves” toward each other. In his essay “The Concept of the Political,” Schmitt argues that political actions and motives can all be boiled down to a distinction between friend (Freund) and enemy (Feind). In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud too provides a political argument that war and aggression between singular human beings are suspended by the formation of political communities, only to be re-established between those political communities. Key to both of their formulations—made in roughly the same years as the Nazis rose to power in Germany (and notably on two opposite sides of that power dynamic with Schmitt joining the Nazi party and Freud, Jewish, fleeing the country)—is that the stranger is deemed an enemy, and a shared enemy becomes one of the strongest forms of social bonds.

Beyond the title, I wanted to make some further clarifications about translation decisions throughout the text. For technical conceptual vocabulary, I have relied on long-established English terminology. This includes terms like godimento, which corresponds to the French jouissance, and in English is often translated as “enjoyment.” It also includes perturbante, which is the Italian translation of the German psychoanalytic term Unheimlich, commonly translated into English as “uncanny.” I have also, in conversation with the author, made two decisions regarding the recurring terms eccitazione, which Bernini often uses to describe a subjective state that the sexual drive aims to incite, and singolo. For the former I have gone with “excitation” rather than “excitement,” even though Bersani, for instance, uses both when writing about the sexual. I did this mostly because “excitement” elicits an image of joy in anticipation of something in English, and “excitation” is somewhat more mechanistic because of its use in the field of physics, which feels truer to the affective state sought after with the sexual drive. I have translated the latter as “singular subject,” rather than the more direct “individual.” This decision has to do especially with the argument that Bernini makes around the sexual’s disruption of sovereign subjectivity, which has long been reified in political philosophy under the name of individualism. The choice of using “singular subject” instead of “individual” emphasizes this interruption of sovereignty while still noting the fact of a distinct singular subject in relation, one which makes up groups, collectives, and communities (all of which come with their own philosophical and semantic baggage as well), and which at the same time emerges from groups, collectives, and xiv Translator’s Preface communities that precede them as their transindividual matrix. However, when Bernini does refer to the subject as thought through the prism of individualism (e.g. the “liberal” subject), he uses the Italian individuo, which in English becomes “individual.” And finally, central to this book’s core argument is Freud’s use of the terms Trieb (drive) and Instinkt (instinct); in Italian, pulsione and istinto. The same distinction is not made in the Italian translation of Freud’s Three Essays because the original German does not include any major use of the term Instinkt.’ Despite this, I have still used Strachey’s translations throughout the text, and have replaced any mention of “instinct” with “drive.”

Matthew Zundel New York January 2023

1 One influential example is Carole Vance’s edited collection Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), which originated as a conference called “Towards a Politics of Sexuality” at Barnard College in April 1982, and which contains essays that use the term “sexual politics” or the “politics of sexuality,” including Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” Carole Vance, “Pleasure and Danger: Towards a Politics of Sexuality,” and Alice Echols’s “The Taming of the Id: Feminist Sexual Politics, 1968-1983.”

2 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 23.

3 Millett, Sexual Politics, 112.

4 According to Millet, the “patriarchal school” “takes the patriarchal family to be the primordial form of human social organization, tribe, nation, etc.,” while the “matriarchal school” argues “that patriarchal rule was preceded by some form of matriarchal rule, where mother-right, the ‘female principle,’ or fertility dominated social and religious life.” Two examples she singles out for the former are Sir Henry Maine’s 1861 study Ancient Law, and Edward Westermarck’s The History of Human Marriage, published in 1891, while for the latter, aside from Engels and Bachofen, she mentions Louis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877), Robert Briffault’s The Mothers (1927), John F. McLennan’s Primitive Marriage (1865), and Alexis Giraud-Teulon’s Les Origines de la Famille (1874). See Millett, Sexual Politics, 108-109.

5 Millett, Sexual Politics, 115, fn. 129.

6 See the editor’s note in the foreword to Jean Laplanche, Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000-2006, ed. John Fletcher, trans. John Fletcher, Jonathan House, and Nicholas Ray (New York: International Psychoanalytic Books, 2011), 1.

7 In his recent English translation of the original 1905 edition, Ulrike Kistner writes: “The term Instinkt does not occur in Drei Abhandlungen—or rather, it is used only once, as an adjective, and then by way of comparison.” Ulrike Kistner, “Translating the First Edition of Freud’s Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie,” in Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: The 1905 Edition, eds. Philippe Van Haute and Herman Westerink, trans. Ulrike Kistner (London: Verso, 2016), Ixxix.

Introduction to the English Edition

The Italian edition of this book, its first edition, was published at the end of 2019. Only three years have passed since then, but it seems as though a geological era has gone by. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the brutal killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 (another, and not the last, in the countless murders of Black Americans perpetrated by the police, which has in turn triggered a transnational anti-racist mobilization that has also reached Italy), the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in August 2021 (which has symbolically concluded the twenty-year season of conflicts that followed the attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001), the Russian invasion of the Ukraine beginning on February 24, 2022 (another in long line of wars in our time, but this time quite close to Europe, and one that defies the international global order established in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989): all of these have been event-breaks. Deaths, too many deaths, that mark a before and after in public debate, in the political imaginary, in reality. To update this text in light of everything that has happened would be too much work for an introduction. However, it is at least worthwhile to try to test some of the theses that are argued in the book with the time that has passed in mind.

The presentations of and discussions about The Sexual/Political that I held in Italy, online during the months of lock-down, then in-person in academic and social movement environments, in institutional and informal situations, together with the acute exchanges that I had with my translator Matthew Zundel (whom I wholeheartedly thank), have been helpful in focalizing what certainly could sound banal. What I have written is strongly influenced by what I am: not only by my ethnic, geographic, sexual, and gendered positionality but also by my professional and generational positions. The book looks to the past, to the history of philosophical, psychoanalytic, and queer thought, from the specific present of a cis-gender (but not so cisgender), middle-aged, white, Italian, gay university professor who faces a rapidly changing world, in the span of whose life to change has also been, and radically, his role in society.

The undeniable achievements that have been won on the juridical level in many countries of the world over the past few decades, among which is Italy, can today persuade LGBTQIA+ youth to think that they can occupy a central position in the social, and LGBTQIA+ activist youth (above all when they engage in a form of “keyboard” activism which confers upon movements a form of serial individualism and not collective action) to even be able to occupy the position of the sovereign: the position of the legislator who prescribes rigid rules of behavior and language not only to themselves but also to everyone, and at the same time the position of the judge who distributes sanctions, censuring and ridiculing on social media those who do not respect those rules. The experimentation with other ways of life, the construction of minority social spaces, the invention of new forms of subjectivity and community which were necessary when I was young—to use an expression of Judith Butler’s'—to make queer existence “livable” on the margins or in the interstices of cis-heterosexual society alone, seems to have given way to the repetition of already given formulas, which propose certainty and stability instead of producing doubts and transformations, which pose solutions rather than problems, which propose only one point of view instead of multiple, which claims to be universal when looking at differences. The appropriate identity category to define oneself and others through the correct use of each letter of the LGBTQIA+ acronym and other terms, the right pronouns and the right ending to indicate gender even in the case of non-binary people,” the suspension of judgment with respect to the intransitive truths that an object declares about themselves, the sex positive and body positive rhetoric according to which every sexual practice is equally valid, every body equally beautiful and—provided there is consent—the sexual is fully pacified with the social, without problems of aesthetics or morality or structural injustice. Such rhetoric considers the political questions that involve sexuality to be, if anything, conjunctural, caused by forms of intersectional oppression—of gender, of class, of racialization, of disabilitization, etc.—of a contingent character that would be in our power to resolve by struggling against injustice. Faith, ultimately in the Marxist sense, prevails in the possibility of liberation and full reconciliation of the private and the public, of the singular and the general. Without rest, without unconscious—without tragedy.

When faced with this optimism of the will, the return of Freud proposed in my book, more than being pessimistic, could appear outdated. And it probably is—as outdated as my middle age. At the beginning of the last century, the founder of psychoanalysis argued that social life is based on the sublimation and the expulsion of the sexual, of which the taboo of anal enjoyment is the symbol.’ He also argued that, consequently, there exists an unavoidable discontent for the human in society, a neurotic discontent (also) caused by this renunciation.* But after the sexual revolution of the 1970s, whose long wake has brought us to the sex-positive rhetoric of today, where such a revolution has taken place, who would still speak of repressive societies? Freud maintained that neurosis is the opposite of perversion: today, in the United States, in Europe, in Italy, who would still call

Introduction to the English Edition 3 themselves neurotic? Are we still neurotic? Can we still call ourselves neurotic? Or by now do we—are we? can we?—only know to call ourselves perverse? Already by 1972, in an important conference in Milan, Lacan argued that in advanced capitalist societies the repressive imperative of tradition has been replaced by an imperative to enjoyment,’ the same imperative which according to Massimo Recalcati cuts the breaks from the drive and stifles desire.° But is that really what he claims? Do we live today in a society of widespread perversion? Are we no longer repressed, but perverse, and therefore free? Are we no longer repressed, but perverse, and for this very reason not free?

As you will read in the fifth chapter, in 1972, the same year in which Lacan held his conference in Milan and three years after the rebellion at the Stonewall Inn in New York, the first public demonstration of the Italian gay liberation movement was held in Sanremo. A small group of very courageous lesbians and very courageous gays, plus Mario Mieli who today we would call non-binary, protested an International Sexological Conference where “reparative therapies” to cure homosexuality and transsexuality were being proposed.’ I was born a year later in 1973. In the almost fifty years that have passed since then—which, as you might have guessed, is a lot of time for me, making me feel old, but it is very little time in historical terms—the feminist and LGBTQIA+ revolution has not only assailed the juridical but also the symbolic order. This revolution has caused important effects which we cannot but celebrate, but at the same time, we must consider recent and therefore fragile achievements, without confusing them with a definitive and unchanging reconfiguration of reality (if an example is needed, then the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in June 2022 that abolished the Roe v. Wade decision, which in 1973 had declared abortion a constitutional right, clearly demonstrates this). In any case, the world has truly changed, and me with it—I have seen it with my own eyes. In 1990, the World Health Organization (WHO) took homosexuality off the list of mental disorders (when I was seventeen, I discovered that I was not afflicted with a psychiatric sickness). Finally, in 2019, transgender identity was also depathologized, and is now referred to as “gender incongruence.”® In Italy it has been possible to change the state record of one’s gender since 1982. It has been possible to do this without recourse to genital surgery since 2015, while lesbian and gay couples have been able to enter into civil unions since 2016—even if they can neither get married nor adopt children. All of this has had significant repercussions in Italy’s collective consciousness and in political debate and has determined new rifts between the right and the left, which have overlapped with and sometimes replaced their differing positions on the problems of economic inequality and social justice. Such events have also, however, brought about new and unprecedented convergences.

And so, in August of 2021, after the United States withdrew its troops from Afghanistan, it was easy for many (myself included) to condemn the oppression of women and sexual minorities perpetrated by the Taliban. And in

February of 2022, it was easy for many, in many cases, the same people, not only to condemn but also to ridicule the grotesque rhetoric of the Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and all of Russia, a rhetoric which was then taken up by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had justified the war in Ukraine by arguing for the necessity to preserve Christian Russian culture from gay pride. In the face of these outbursts of sexism and homo-lesbo-trans-pan-negativity, we felt comforted by the idea of a secular Europe, where gender equality is in full force, where lesbians and gays have been integrated through the right to marriage, where younger generations are ever-more sexually free, ever-more sexually uninhibited, ever-more sexually fluid. Yet, we must acknowledge that the possibility of this comfort has been generated only in the past fifty years. In medicine, in law, in politics—and then through the market, as not only Massimo Recalcati has emphasized but also Paul B. Preciado who defines our present moment as the Pharmocopornographic Era.”

In fact, it is through the market that the repressive imperative of tradition has been overturned into the neoliberal imperative to enjoyment, from which sexual transgression is neither repressed nor inhibited, but provoked and put in service of profit. Today the internet saturates our lives with pornography. The pill, anxiety medication, anti-depressants, PrEP and PEP, hormones, Beta blockers, assisted reproductive therapies, Viagra, methamphetamines, GHB, chemsex: all of this chemical equipment today saturates our sexed bodies. Many currently argue that prostitution is work like any other, even in countries—like Italy—where from a legal standpoint, it is not. For vast swaths of the population, sex-positive thinking is, indeed, mainstream. We tell ourselves, a very problematic “we,” a “we” in quotation marks, which, to be clear, includes neither the Taliban nor the Patriarch Kirill of Moscow—we tell ourselves that for this “we,” the sexual is no longer a political or personal problem. Is this not the society we live in, the one in which LGBTQIA+ youth can feel fully integrated, to the point of assuming a position of sovereignty? What if instead it was the society we like to tell ourselves we live in?

In my view, we live in an assemblage of heterogeneous, and sometimes contradictory, planes of reality (which has probably always been the case, but today more than ever). On one of these planes, sex positive common sense essentially convinces us that it is possible to completely reconcile the sexual subject with the social subject. However, on another plane—with all due respect to Lacan and Preciado—civilization’s discontent continues to play out as in the time of good-old Freud. If the first function of the political is the creation of the social bond, the social bond still edifies itself at the expense of the sexual through its repression and sublimation. Despite all that has happened in only fifty years, despite the sacred victories of feminism and the LGBTQIA+ movements, in our hyper-hedonistic societies, the sexual is still neurotically expelled from the social through the identification of scapegoats who are elected as its representatives. And this is also carried out “by us,” in the “civilized West”: the sexual also continues to be used by us to

Introduction to the English Edition 5 exclude the “other,” to make them into monsters, to make them abject. The prologue with which this book opens and the epilogue with which it closes offer eloquent rhetorical examples of sexual abjection that have been widespread in contemporary political debate, which at the same time are aimed at sexual minorities and racialized migrant subjects. As you will read, these examples are taken from the public speeches of the Federal Secretary of the Lega party, Matteo Salvini, the protagonist of the populist period of Italian politics that has been suspended by the outbreak of the pandemic.

When I wrote the epilogue in September of 2019, I wondered if Salvini’s break with Giuseppe Conte’s government and the establishment of a second government under Conte also supported by the center-left parties would have weakened or strengthened right-wing populism in Italy in the long run. After almost three years, following the fall of the united national government lead by ex-president of the Central European Bank Mario Draghi, which followed Conte’s government so as to manage the economic and social crisis cause by the pandemic,!° I can confirm that the risk of a victory by the right-wing parties in the next elections has risen. However, it will probably not be Salvini who leads the right-wing coalition as prime minister (whose aspirations are to return to the position of Minister of the Interior), but instead to Giorgia Meloni, leader of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party, heir to historical Fascism. Remaining in the opposition to the Draghi government, which, however, the Lega has supported until this latest crisis, Fratelli d’Italia has in fact become the most preferred party for Italians according to polls. Italy could therefore have its first woman prime minister, who is certainly not a feminist, but who is certainly intersectional in her defense of white cisheterosexuality. In fact, Giorgia Meloni, who in a meeting held in Marbella on June 13, 2022, in support of the Spanish party Vox, has summed up the political program of the transnational extreme right by yelling out some simple hateful words as a slogan, her neck swollen with anger:

There are no possible compromises; either we say yes or no. Yes to natural families—no the LGBT lobby! Yes to sexual identity—no to gender ideology! Yes to the culture of life—no to the abyss of death! Yes to the universality of the cross—no to Islamist violence! Yes to secure borders— no to mass immigration! Yes to the work of our citizens—no to big international finance! Yes to the sovereignty of the people—no to the bureaucrats in Brussels! Yes to our civilization—no to those who wish to destroy it!!!