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- Title
Three Layers of Ambiguity: Homosexual Spies and International Intrigue in Fascist Italy.
- Authors
Carnaghi, Benedetta
- Abstract
This article delves into the stories of two foreign queer spies in Fascist Italy, the Swiss Roberto Hodel and the German Gerhard Dobbert. The Fascist regime cultivated a dual relationship with homosexuals: it exploited them for their contacts, but persecuted them as "enemies of the new man" who undermined the Fascist understanding of morality. This article aims at illustrating this relationship, by focusing on these two cases and ultimately proving that the Fascist surveillance--like any other--is doomed to fail, because these double agents are "imperfect" tools. Spies live in a gray zone of blurred agencies and conflicting incentives. As in fiction, where characters play a deceitful role, the archival documents analyzed in this essay replicate that deception in three layers of ambiguity. Just as spy novels become open-ended trajectories of several stages of suspicion, these layers of ambiguity are multiplied in the spies' surveillance reports, where the distrust of the foreign alien is combined with the rejection of homosexuality to designate an extremely ambiguous "other" that the Fascists both reject and exploit.
- Subjects
AMBIGUITY; HOMOSEXUALITY; FASCIST aesthetics; TOTALITARIANISM; AUTHORITARIANISM
- Publication
Space Between: Literature & Culture, 1914-1945, 2017, Vol 13, Issue 2017, p1
- ISSN
1551-9309
- Publication type
Article