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The South Central Modern Language Association

Formations, Locations and Reproductions of Fascist Fantasies


Author(s): Liz Constable
Source: South Central Review, Vol. 14, No. 3/4, Fascism & Culture: Continuing the Debate
(Autumn - Winter, 1997), pp. 59-71
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of The South Central Modern
Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3190208
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Formations,Locationsand Reproductionsof Fascist
Fantasiest
Liz Constable
Universityof California,Davis

The conjunctionof fascismandfantasyinevitablyrecallsKlaus


Theweleit'sextensivetwo volume studyof the Freikorps'Male
Fantasies(1987). Now a decadelater,fourbooks-representing
some of the most important,innovative scholarly work on
fascism-shift ourfocus to the literaland figurativematricesof
fascistfantasies-women. The naturalization of motherhood; the
of
fantasy harnessing women as the literalreproductiveorgansof
the fascist collectivity; the repiesentationof the sexualized
violation,anddestruction of signifiersof thefeminineto demarcate
sexual and economic autarky:given these staples of fascist
ideologicalfantasies,women'sroles in, accommodations to, and
revisionsof the genderingof powerin ItalianfascismandNational
Socialism-one of the main foci of these studies-make a
particularlycompellingtopicfor analysis.It is safeto say,without
leveling out the specificitiesof particularhistoricaland political
articulationsof fascism, as ideologyand/orregime,that fascist
ideology recognized and celebratedwomen insofar as they
remainedin the domestic,orprivate,sphereas mothersandwives,
while it also calleduponthemto participatepolitically. And yet,
as each authorhere asks, what do we know aboutthe women
affiliatedwith, or supportiveof, fascism, yet excludedby the
narrowgender prescriptionsof such an ideological filter: the
unmarried; the childless;thosewho occupieda publicrole;those
whose defense of women's rights made them intolerantof the
misogynyof reproductive scriptsand disdainfulof the paucityof
roles accordedto them in fascist ideology? How do women
negotiate,or rewrite,what BarbaraSpackmanrefersto as "the
fascisttopographyof sex and gender"-the boundariesof public
andprivatespace-when, as she observesin the discursiveregime
of Italian fascism, "stepping out into the public sphere
'masculinizes'and 'sterilizes' women," and "productionand
reproduction are strictly,and asymmetrically, linkedfor men and
women"(35).
Negotiating and renegotiating public and private space
constitutesnot only the objectiveof fascistideology;it is also the

C SouthCentralReview14.3-4 (Fall-Winter1997): 59-71.


60 South
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lens through which these four richly researched studies converge in their
approaches to women's interpellation by, and renegotiation of, fascist
topographies of sex and gender. By tracing their analyses of these shifting
boundaries,we inevitably focus on only one aspect of each of these studies. Yet,
adoptingthis focused approachalso allows us a nodal point from which to address
the larger methodological,theoretical,and conceptualquestionseach authorraises
in her analysis of women's roles in forming, locating, and reproducing (albeit
differently)fascist fantasies.
"Going out means going virile" (39), Spackman remarks of Enif Robert's
perspectiveas female futurist on women in the public sphere. For Spackman,the
rhetoricof virility, and its accompanyingreproductivefantasies, are central to the
workings of fascist ideology, a rhetoric which finds its "breedinggrounds"in F.
T. Marinetti's futurist writings on women's issues (7). Where critics have often
dismissed fascism as precisely mere rhetoric-supposedly empty, though
incantatory,emotive, words-Spackman redirectsour attentionto the centiality of
rhetorical and semiotic transformationsin fascism's self-definition. Indeed, her
focus on fascism as discursive regime, "a movement in semiotic overdrive"(6),
and her particular definition of ideological fantasy, allow her to move very
competently, and effectively, from the analysis of literary texts (Marinetti and
GabrieleD'Annunzio), to political andjournalistic essays (feminist fascist Teresa
Labriola), and to political speeches (Mussolini). Where fascism has frequently
been defined as lacking an ideology-i.e., a coherent world view-Spackman
approaches fascist discourse instead with SlavojZizek's definition of the
ideological as a structuringillusion which correspondsto reality, a social reality
in which we systematicallybehave as if the illusion were true, in the same way,
suggests Zizek, as ideology governs the economy of commodity fetishism.1 The
critical strength of such a definition lies not only in foregroundingthe everyday
banalityof the materialpracticesconstitutingfascist ideology;it also lies in
avoiding ensnaring analyses in problematic attempts to distinguish between
appearance and reality, between representations and the reality of lived
experiences of fascism, a critical trapto which we will returnin discussing Mabel
Berezin's study. And as Spackmanargues, it is not that coherenceis the weak card
in the fascist hand; rather,it is that fascism's very incoherence-packaged
rhetorically as the binding and articulating of contradictory and disparate
elements-constitutes its ideological ace. Emphasizing the structuringpotential
of ideology, Spackman draws on Laplanche and Pontalis's understanding of
fantasy to suggest that in ideological fantasy, we cannot localize the subject's
position in or through any one position or element, but rather through the
structuralrelationsconnecting the elements, i.e., the syntax of the fantasy.2 In this
way, Spackman's isolation of "structuralanalogies" in the syntax of ideological
fantasies makes possible sound analytic, and methodological, bridges between
literaryanalysis and the analysis of social and culturalinterventions(xi).
However, if fascist virilities might strikethe readeras somewhat of a truism, or
a self-evident comment on fascist ideological fantasies, Spackman's use of the
plural (virilities, and not virility) suggests the richly complex argumentto follow,
Liz Constable 61

which has everythingto do with women and fascism. Startingfrom CarloEmilio


Gadda's intentionallyparodic referenceto "thevirile vulva of the Italian woman"
(1)-a dig at the fascist propensity to unlimited virilization of its
world-Spackman examines the ways such supposedlyunnaturalsplitting of sex
from gender leads us directlyto women's articulationsof their ventures into public
(coded masculine) space. She distinguishes meticulously between Marinetti's
virility, defined as the exclusive property of Italian males, and D'Annunzio's
virility, which invokes Romanvirti as a locus of self-discipline not gender-bound,
and which molds itself, through the feminine, in the likeness of the mother.
D'Annun7io taps the culturalechoes of CaterinaSforza's defiant gesture of baring
her genitals in responseto a threatto kill her children;retortingthat she possesses
the mold from which to produce more children, she links political power to
reproduction,a violation of the Aristotelianseparationbetween virile courage and
maternallove, and for D'Annunzio, a sign of a heroic womb.
As Spackmanunderscores,D'Annunzio's heroic womb is but a flickering light
thrown on virile maternity in a text which subsequently returns women to a
conventionallypassive maternalrole. However, Valentine de Saint Point's 1912
Manifeste de lafemme futuriste calls for an increasedvirilization of women, and
once again quotes Caterina Sforza's gesture as one which "goes beyond her sex"
(40). We might understandthe significance of "going beyond her sex" for de
Saint Point, Spackmansuggests, not simply as either the exposing of the "private"
in public space or the affirming of woman's sexual differencefrom men (and the
implicit refusal of masculinityas the single defining term), but more significantly,
as a "threat not only to property relations but also to the 'proper' relations of
gender and sex, both understoodas relations of reproduction"(40). Spackman
goes on to find a more sustained re-articulation of a woman's perspective on
fascist fantasies in feminist fascist Teresa Labriola, daughter of the Marxist
philosopher Antonio Labriola. Ex-suffragist turned anti-emancipationist,
Labriola capitalizes on the universalizing potential of virility-its ability to pose
as the only term in masculine economies-and forges from this mystification a
reverse mystificationin the name of femininity, which allows her to figure a virile
woman yet who is not masculinized. As Spackmanputs it, "Labriola'sstrategyat
once accepts the logic of identity that posits the male term as unmarked and
refuses the erasureand denigrationof feminine differencethat the logic requires"
(43). The move is particularlyintriguing and exemplary of the ways in which
fascist women also bind togetherthe reactionaryand the progressive,for Labriola
ends up making of motherhooda social and legal category,not a biological one, a
denaturalizingof motherhoodwhich unhooks sex and gender in ways we are more
likely to associate with contemporaryfeminist theory. And yet, by rewriting
motherhood in terms of a "sacerdotalspiritual mother" (46), not only does her
denaturalizing buy into universalizing pretensions; it is, in the same move, an
anti-egalitarianstrategywhich figures its exclusions as "naturalmaternity,""the
unwed genitrix who [.. .] exists in Bolshevik nature"(47).
Where Spackman analyzes so meticulously the paradoxes and contradictions
implicit for women who accept, yet inflect differently, male fascist fantasies,
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Cinzia Blum also addressesthe role of women in futurismwith the aim of teasing
out their distinct reinscription of tangled ideological threads. Arguing that too
often critics have assumedfuturistwomen to be mimetic counterpartsof their male
contemporaries,she sets out to show "a differentand conflict-ladenrepresentation
of the feminine, one that internalizes and contradictsthe notions and fantasies
discussed" (111). In the opening sections of her book, Blum has established that
for her, futurism's central ideological construct-the fantasy in question-is a
"mythopoeiaof individual and national regeneration"(vii), whose analysis will
allow her to treat both the aesthetic and political dimensions of futurism, rather
than splitting them off as separateentities. Unfortunately,these opening sections,
in contrast to the energy, focus, and insightfulness of textual analysis in
subsequent chapters, make for rather heavy reading because of Blum's
commendably comprehensive, yet often frustratingly diffuse, efforts to situate
futurism as "the other modernism." Amidst many "situating"or "contextual"
leferences to turn-of-the-centuryliterature,philosophy, and politics, Blum does
give readers a sustained historicizing and theoretical thread when she surveys
articles appearing in Italian militant journals during the first two decades of the
twentieth century-journals formative of futurism-to end up pinpointing the
crisis of modernity (the moder neurosis) as an option to pursue either "theories
of relativism and voluntarismto the nihilistic extremes or to revisit the classical
shores of absolutevalue" (5). Picking up the thread of this modernist dilemma a
few pages later-now rephrased as irrationality versus faith in positivist
progress-Blum points to futurists' recourse to Giovanni Papini's philosophical
pragmatism as the way of reconciling opposites (binding and articulating again)
throughthe utilitarianbelief that all theories and belief have a purely instrumental
value. In the case of Italy, Papini urged the pursuit of individualistic,
nationalistic, and spiritual ideals as strategies of empowermentto fight what he
consideredthe democraticleveling of minds.
However, the thread which Blum gives us to situate futurism's program of
national rebirth as resolutely anti-tradition and passionately engaged with the
aesthetic possibilities of modem technology disappearsfrom sight in her tendency
to make the very claims she intends to be "historicizing"also so generalizingly
vague as to renderthem, on the contrary,ratherahistorical. For example, we read
that Marinetti's desire to assimilate and/or annihilate the feminine other "can be
traced both to changes in the social configuration of gender relations and to a
destabilization of the Western ideal of the separate, bound, and autonomous
subject" (ix), and that "the polarized, asymmetrical configuration of masculine
totality and feminine lack provides a bedrock and a blueprint for the futurist
destructionand reconstructionof the universe" (viii). We can probablyattribute
this unintentionally woolly effect of her introductoryanalyses to Blum's double
appeal to both historicizing and psychoanalytic models, which in and of itself
should not be problematic methodologically. However, the combination seems
still to be methodological work-in-progress,suggestive ratherthan authoritative,
as, for example, when Blum uses psychodynamicmodels of the autonomous self
as testimony to what she loosely refers to as a modem crisis in authoritywithout
Liz Constable 63

working through such connections in a more sustainedway.


Blum puts to work psychoanalytic and psychodynamic models of power and
desire (Julia Kristeva on abjection and Jessica Benjamin on the dynamics of
domination and subjugation)in an analysis of gender which attemlptsto disclose
the "unarticulatedemotional underside"of Marinetti'sfuturism (viii), to add "the
psychology of gender"to analyses of rhetoricand politics (26), and to understand
"the emotional substratum of the fiction of power" in Marinetti's novel (59),
Mafarka le Futuriste.3 Although Blum's own blending of historical and
psychodynamic explanations remains somewhat unworked, she very insightfillly
locates the pitfalls of a similar undigestedblend in Alice Kaplan's explanation of
fascism's seductive power as an appeal to mother-bounddesires for symbiotic
unity between subject and object, and then her analysis of French fascism's
mobilization of technology-particularly sound-as a propagandistevocation of
the nation-as-mother,the maternalleader.4 Pointing first to the risk that Kaplan's
theoretical approach reinforces rather than questions, "the age-old dualism
between the mother's utopian (irrational) seduction and the father's pragmatic
(rational) authority," Blum then argues that seductive propaganda techniques
were the tools of diverse political, and commnercial groups in the early twentieth-
century, and thus cannot be isolated as specifically fascist without a somewhat
blinkered relationshipto history (22).
Tracing the "Rhetoricof Gender in the Manifestos," and then "The Superman
and the Abject:Mafarka le futuriste" (ChaptersTwo and Three), Blum's fourth
chapter,"TheHeart with WatertightCompartmentsand the Travel-sizedWoman:
Futurist Strategies in Love and War," studies Marinetti's unyoking of love and
sentimentality (decadently passe notions) from sexuality, and his restriction of
sexuality to biological reproduction,prefiguringfascist atteimptsto controlfemale
desire and behavior. Futurist gender politics and subsequentfascist ideological
fantasies are not localizable on a simple linear continuum, as Blum is careful to
point out. For Marinetti's attack on bourgeois mores, on the hypocrisy of love,
marriage,and the bourgeois family, this "revolutionary"potential so distinct from
fascism's later confirmation and consecration of family values is nevertheless,
writes Blum, an " attemptedsubversionof the family [which] ultimately becomes
a reactionaryassault on woman. Her value is appropriatedas a national asset"
(81). Thus we move from futurism to fascism's ideological fantasies. Where
Blum's analysis of Mafarka shows the metallicized superman as the aggressive
defense of the male individuality against any erosion or confusion of gender
identities in the futurist manual Come si seducono le donne, she analyzes
Marinetti's metaphorof the heart as an armeddread-nought,a strategyto fight off
feminine sentimentality by affective impermeability. However, this is not the
whole story, for if impermeability provides one figure for Marinetti's violent,
erotic fantasies of domination and subjugation,it is accompanied by the literal
incorporation of the woman-one more strategy to control female desire-as
recounted in a novella, "La carne congelata" ("Frozen Flesh"), the tale of a
soldier's cannibalistic fantasy. Marinetti reworks the topos of the lover who
consumes the heart of his or her dead lover, and as Blum effectively illustrates,the
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idealizing transfiguration at work here is merely the flip side of a degrading
objectificationand submission;idealization and objectificationwork togetherwith
domination and subjugation. Blum's analysis here draws heavily on Jessica
Benjamin's object-relationsapproach to a desired reciprocity in intersubjective
relations, and Benjamin's insights certainly throw light on the boundaries of
domination and submission as they appearin Marinetti's violent erotic fantasies.
However, when we read an extract from Marinetti's La Carne Congelata, in
which the shock trooper,Guzzo, has killed his lover, devouredher head, legs, and
arms, and transportsthe rest as a "travel-size"woman in his back-pack, Blum's
comment that such fantasies, following Benjamin, are "predicatedon the failure
of reciprocityand mutual recognition"and that "such an imbalancedrelationship
cannot be rehabilitated," produces a somewhat amusing dissonance of tone
between theoretical approachand literarytext (96). After all, cannibalism would
indeed seem to indicate something of a failure of reciprocity! Akin to the uneasy
combination of historical and psychoanalytic models in Blum's work that we
pointed to earlier, here the mobilizing of Benjamin's theories of intersubjectivity
would be much more effective if more thoroughlyintegratedinto Blum's writing.
Blum's fifth chapter,"TheHero's War and the Heroine's Wounds: Un ventre di
donna,"turns specifically to women and/in futurism,and contributesa significant
dimension to our understandingof the work of both Valentine de Saint Point and
Enif Robert. Robertexpresses her disdain for literaryromanticismand the role it
accordswomen by valorizing "realbodily urgings"to replace "sentimentalcliches
and spiritual abstractions"(113). As Blum comments, "The proposed alternative
is an energetic, futuristtreatmentof courageand truth-a new, feminine discourse
representinga new woman, freed from the taboos of bourgeois moralism and from
the hypocrisy of displaced language. Robert makes the case for an honest, open
sexuality . . . "(113). Robert's text, Un ventre di donna, through narrative,
dialogue, and epistolaryinterjections,presents the autobiographicalaccount of a
headstrongyoung widow who refuses to remarry,and whose life is plagued by a
gynecological dysfunctionrenderingher unable to reproduce. Her illness results
in surgery and a painful, protractedconvalescence, during which an epistolary
relationship with Marinetti prompts her to engage in a "futurist"therapeutic
program of artistic creativity, an aesthetic birth, one might say, through
articulatingher surgical experiences in language. Blum argues that the resulting
manifestationof "'surgical' words in freedom"producesa ratherdismal record of
aggression directed against the self, of the familiar male futurist
fantasies-dismemberment, necrophilia, and cannibalism-rewritten as the
heroic feminine, which only reinforces stereotypes of female passivity and
masochism (115). This returnsus to our earlierdiscussion of Spackman'sanalysis
of feminist fascist, Teresa Labriola. Blum signals a contradictory position in
Robert's stance: a feminine non-reproductiveheroism neverthelessremainsbound
and limited by its focus on the female body's sexuality and pathology, and more
significantly, limited in its related refusal to offers points of identification with
other women. Feminine heroism is for the exceptional woman of genius, and
Robert writes of her excluded female others, "I have nothing in common with
Liz Constable 65

those flaccid, enormousNeapolitan matronsin their bathing suits; they are black,
slimy and diluted like seals on the sand, with their darting and boiling litters
spread around them" (118). It comes as no surprise that Blum deems such
superficial redirection, ratherthan substantiverearticulation,of Marinetti's ideas
a somewhat dubious "ideological foundation for the restructuringof the social
organization of gender," and scarcely a promising renegotiationof the impact of
existing private and public boundarieson women's lives (124).
Mabel Berezin's cultural-sociological study, Making the Fascist Self: The
Political Culture of Interwar Italy, gives a central place to the private/public
boundaryby defining fascism primarily in opposition to liberal democracy, and
more specifically, as a denial of the public/private distinction which liberal
democracy makes central to its workings. Approaching fascism in terms of
citizenship, state, nation, and the fascist constructionof the self, her theoretical
approachdiffers significantly from that of Spackmanand Blum, since she retains
a somewhat under-articulated notion of ideology as world view-rather than
structuringillusion-and, as a result, ends up trying to resist the contradictions
embodied in Italian fascism without apparentlyexplaining if there is any valid
methodological reason for doing so. Fascism, she writes, "as a political ideology
and cultural programappears less protean if one redefines it as the fusion of the
public and private self in the state" (27). An answer of sorts can be found in one
of the overarching theoretical premises of Berezin's study, which sets out to
demonstratethat "Representationsof ideological power do not equal realities of
power" (27). This statement, articulated in various forms at many points
throughout the text, bespeaks Berezin's wariness of what she perceives
(inaccurately, I would argue) as the incursions of so-called "postmodern
approaches to the study of politics" (27). It takes the philosophical rigor and
matter-of-factness of a Judith Butler to point out the ways in which the label
postmodern rarely functions as a label by which one identifies theoretical or
methodologicalprinciples,but rather,is the sign of "paternalisticdisdain"towards
any theory of politics which implies a critique of the subjectand a challenging of
the referentiality of language.5 As Richard Gilman observes about the term
"decadence,"postmodernism is primarily an "onlooker's term," and one which
conjuresup frequentlymuddledassumptionsthat there is only discourse, and, just
as alarmingly from the perspective of normative political philosophy, that
representationsreplace reality.6 Indeed, Berezin's adamancy in eschewing the
validity of what she calls a "semioticand discursive analysis" of fascism not only
suggests a problematic misunderstanding of Foucauldian notions of discourse
(32). Much more prejudicially,in her study of Italian fascism's attempt to fuse
public and private space through reappiopriatingthe forms of Catholic liturgy in
public ritual, Berezin allows her rejection of discursive analysis to fuse with
fascism's self-representation as an emotive, experiential, and supposedly
"natural," (i.e., non-rhetorical) set of political and cultural practices. Indeed,
Berezin says as much when she comments that she wants to approachfascism on
its own terms (5, 9), because "Italianfascism rejecteddiscursiveprose or linearity.
It repudiatedthe word and the text" (29).
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Repudiation being precisely the strategy whereby any foundational position
producesthe very exclusions which constitutethe contingent, ratherthan absolute,
authorityof its folundations,
it is no surprisethatBerezin'sstudydoesnottakeinto
accountthe insidious workings of the "rhetoricof anti-rhetoric"-as Paolo Valesio
terms the ideological belief that meaning can be articulated without rhetorical
choices7-either within Italian fascism or, implicitly, in her own methodological
approach, and this even though she entitles her study, Making the Fascist Self.
The price paid is rather high, and as we will see, makes for somewhat
unsurprising conclusions about the relationship between representations and
realities of fascist selves.
Berezin starts her study by isolating the piazza and the church as two public
spaces exploited by Italian fascism as locations for the forging of new identities
based on the merging of the private self into a national, fascist, public, and
collective self. She structuresher book aroundthree case studies: the analysis of
annual commemorations of the March on Rome between 1923 and 1938; an
analysis of the way fascist rituals structured everyday life in Verona through
infiltrating patterns of daily life and through the repeated, as distinct from the
extraordinary,social experience of ritual;and finally, an ittempt to explore what
Italian fascism meant to its adherents through comparing the letters home of
fascist rank-and-file soldiers with the official encomiastic obituarybiographies.
Within her focus on ritual practice, Berezin defines five genres of ritual:
commemoration,celebration, demonstration,symposia, and inauguration. As a
cultural sociologist, she articulatesher rejectionof semiotic analysis by pointing
out that when dealing with culturalpractices, an analysis of the text would elide
the distinction between observerand participantas separateinterpretingentities,
and that such approaches conceptualize ritual as an object rather than as a
repetitive action which "produces morphologies of meaning based in the
familiarity that repeatedexposure to ritual forms generates"-for example, group
solidarity (246). But then, somewhat bewilderingly, she argues that textual
analysis gives short shrift to form in its focus on content. She writes, "An analysis
of fascist ritual that simply read the text of the available representation, or
describedit as the sacralizationof public space in the name of the regime, would
fail to capture the meaning of the ritual to its participantsbroadly defined, and
would skim the surfaceof the official meanings of the event" (32).
In their imperative to resist official meanings of events, Berezin's arguments
make a good deal of sense, although even at this stage, a distinct tension and
incoherence emerges between such intended resistance and her determinationto
approach fascism on its own terms. We can locate the tension as one which
manifests itself in two differentdimensions of the reception and/or interpretation
of fascism. First, Berezin's methodological focus on reception and uptake as a
sociological phenomenon ("Howthe citizens of fascist Italy received the regime's
cultural message" [34]) is highly problematic,for in seeking to uncover, in the
battle-front letters of fascist heroes, "the best available articulations of an
authentic and spontaneousfascist consciousness"(198), she overlooks the ways in
which fascist rank-and-file soldiers are interpellatedby the very fascist rhetoric
Liz Constable 67

which she hopes to be peeling away. Lettersfrom the front, writtento mothersand
wives, constitutea genre in themselves, and one which is more than likely to adopt
the terms of official rhetoric to describe what Berezin describes as "fascism as a
felt experience" (198). Indeed, not unexpectedly, in the comparison of official
obituaries and personal letters, Berezin herself ends up concluding-contrary to
her objectives-that when "read against each other, they [obituaries and the
letters] saggest a fascist reality that melded with the representationof that reality"
in their emphasis on the glorification of noble sacrifices in the name of fascism
(199). Where the letters to parents underscorethe fascist commitmentto family,
the letters to wives reflect "a sense of public duty as fascist citizen and private duty
as husbandand father"(222): no surprisesthere.
Just as troubling in Berezin's analysis is her perspective on her own
interpretationand reception of the rhetoric of fascism. As we have indicated,
although her methodologicalpremises prompther to sidesteptextual analysis, this
is difficult since her materials are inevitably constitutedby contemporarypublic
discourses-journalistic reports, official documents, and propagandistliterature.
Again and again, she confionts the need for the very type of semiotic analysis she
mistrusts,be it the "iconographyof emotion," or the narrativizingof ritual events
(72). Pointing quite legitimately to the discrepancy between the amplificatory
language of newspapei reportsof fascist ritualsand the actual events, Berezin then
writes, somewhat perplexingly, that "By simply analyzing the rhetorical
constructionsof these events, we accept the regime's propaganda"(96; emphasis
added). Were Berezin to comment that an un-analytic, or uncritical, reading of
fascist rhetoric would be tantamountto an endorsement of its propaganda, her
statemtentwould make more sense. But, no. Instead, she writes that an analysis of
rhetoricalconstructionsbetraysideological complicity. If I seem to be belaboring
this point in my own review of Berezin's study, it is because her uncritical
dismissal of rhetoric's constitutive role in semiosis (not simply an ornamental,
expendable option as she understands it) leaves her own work very frequently
uncritically accepting fascism's purportedlynon-rhetorical self-representation,
even when she seeks precisely to resist this. For in her conunent above on the
misguidedness implicit in analyses of rhetoric, it is surely the very granting of
significance to rhetoric, and not its analysis, which Berezin intends to target.
When she turns to study the people's adunate, huge political rallies launched in
1935 (the year the regime invadedEthiopia), as a celebrationof fascism's colonial
and imperialist objective, Berezin writes the following: "The adunate defy
discursive description. They were spectacles of force that depended on the
massing of bodies in the public piazza. They were also pure communities of
feeling in which individualItalianbodies abandonedtheir sense of separateselves
and fused with the regime"(135). Pure communitiesoffeeling? Fusion of the self
with the collectivity? Events which, like the horizon of the sublime, leave
language disarmed? Berezin's own rhetorichere is difficult to reconcile with her
earlier resistance, when she comnrentson a newspaperreport of the first annual
commemoration of the March on Rome on October 23, 1923. Here, after
signaling that the report-from a paper with Fascist sympathies, II Resto del
68 South Review
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Carlino-is misleading since it uses "the language of feeling to create an
iconographyof emotion"(72), Berezinrewritesthe reportin whatshe refersto as
"starkanalyticprose"to pointto the tensionbetween"representations of power
and realities of powerthat any studyof politicsand culturemust address"(73,
emphasisadded).
Berezin'sowndifficultyin keepingrepresentations andrealitiesapartis notonly
attributableto her treatmentof receptionas a sociologicalphenomenon. Her
referenceto a "fascistconsciousness" emergingthroughthe soldiers'lettersis also
telling in this regard(198). In the final section,Berezin'sstudyof the obituaries
and lettersof fascistsoldiersincludesanalysisof severalphotos,includingone of
MicheleM., a formeraccountant,husbandand father,and fascist squadleader
who writesfromthe Greekfrontbetween1940and 1941. Berezincomnuents that
"Incontrastto imagesfrompopularculture,MicheleM.'s photograph... suggests
a mild-mannered personwho looks morelike a local businessmanthan a hard-
edged fascist" (223). Here, Berezin attributesan almost nineteenth-century
physiognomical, definitionof a "fascistprofile"to imagesfrom
or anthropological,
popularculture, yetand doesn'tnecessarilyendorseit. Later,however,when she
turns to study Letitia M., unmarriedschool-teacher,her commentaryis
particularly intriguing.As we havealreadyseen,unmarried womenhad"noplace
in eitherItalianor fascist culture,"the only social or culturalpowerlying with
womenwhoborechildren(241). Letitia'srole,as Berezincomments,is to takeon
the fascistideologicalcommitmentequivalentto a nun's spiritualmarriagewith
Christ:whereCatholicnuns becomebridesof Christ,Letitiaworkedas fascist
spiritualbride, literallyunmarriedyet spirituallyweddedto the regime, and
involved,on a moreconcretelevel, with the RuralHousewivesAssociationwho
redefinedwives'andmothers'rolesthroughfascistideology.Turningto the photo
of Letitia,Berezinadds,"Whatthe fascistlocal chief does not add and that the
picturesbearoutis that,by the standardsof 1940sItaly,Letitiais physicallyrather
unattractive.Her soul maybe beautiful,but her personis not.... In a culture
wheretherewas a clearlydefinedmarriagemarket,Letitiaseemsto havehadonly
herfascistorganizations to give herlife meaning"(237). Now,withoutdisputing
the attractiveness or unattractivenessof Letitiaor Berezin'sabilityto generalize
about the "standards[of beauty] of the 1940s" (both observationswhose
gratuitousness needlesme, nevertheless), the commentstrikesme,first,as another
inadvertentand clearlyunintentionalbuyinginto fascism's own ideology(that
thereis no life outsideof ordainedgenderroles). But it is also symptomatically
troublingin its presumption to know"thetruestory,"i.e., thatLetitiasupposedly
didn't have any othersourceof meaningfilnessin her life, a presumptuousness
whichis all the morestartlingsince,as Berezintells us, nota singlewrittenword
of Letitia's-be it letter,diary,or note-was keptby the fascist partychief, in
contrastto the letterswrittenby malefascistheroes.
In Berezin'sconclusion,she opensfor the first time, and somewhatbelatedly,
the crucial methodologicalcan of worms-worms which in fact have been
creeping throughher projectfrom its opening pages-when she quotes the
anthropologistKatherineVerdery,who calls the questionof receptionthe "is-
Liz Constable 69

anyone-listeningproblem."8 However,as quicklyas she opensthe methodological


can, she also replacesthe lid in her concludingsentence,when she writesthat
"someonehas been listening-to something"(251). Berezin'savoidanceof a
moresustaineddiscussionof the problemsimplicitin receptiontheoryshouldnot
detractfrom the significanceof the fascinatinglydetailed,and meticulously
researched,projectBerezinhas undertakenon publicpoliticalritualin fascist
Italy, but I would venture to suggest that her project would be massively
strengthened throughhavingengagedthis questionfromthe outset.
The aptlynamed"is-anyone-listening problem"in analysesof audienceimpact
and receptiontakes us directlyto Kate Lacey's study,FeminineFrequencies:
Gender, GermanRadio, and the Public Sphere, 1923-1945. Here, she focuses on
the WeimarRepublicandthe ThirdReichto analyzethe dialecticin whichgender
ideologyinformsthe practicesof broadcasting,and simultaneously,how radio
broadcasting actsas a technologyof gender,takingTeresade Lauretis'sterm.9In
contrastto Berezin,Laceyrecognizesfrom the startthe problemsof tryingto
researchreception,and cautiouslyframesher studyin consequence.She writes
that"theaudienceis generallypresenthereonly insofaras it was constructedin
the publicdiscourseof the time"(11), andthatif one assumedthatthe audience
could be treatedas a "sociologicalphenomenon," "such an analysis of the
historicalfemaleaudiencewouldraisea plethoraof methodological problems"of
whichshe steersclear(108). This she doesby selectingprimarilycontemporary
radiojournalsbecausethey offer "themost reliablesourcesfor indicatingthe
discursiverules informingthe publicperceptionand receptionof radioin the
period"(11). Here again, in contrastto Berezin's objectiveof finding the
"realities"of powerthroughlost voices, Lacey explainsher focus on women's
radio,notas a solely"additive"or"compensatory" methodological retrievalof lost
female voices, an approach which risks leaving the key
term-gender-unquestioned. Instead,fromthe perspectiveof her trainingin
mediastudies,she investigatesthe discursivemeaningand instrumentalizing of
gender.
Lacey's sensitively complex articulationof radio as a crucial tool in
renegotiatingboundariesbetweenpublicand privatespace drawson Anthony
Giddens'snotionthat modernitywitnessesa separationof space fromplace, a
separationwhichbringswithit two distinctconsequences: the absenceof face-to-
face interaction
fostersrelationsbetweenabsentothers,andthen,the colmpression
of spaceandtimebringsdisconnectedandfragmentedinfonmation into everyday
consciousness.'?Andwhile,as Laceypointsout,genderedmetaphorsoftenfigure
radioas the intrusionof a (male)publicdiscourseinto (female)privatespace,her
focus on the developmentof programmingfor and by women-through the
regional Frauenfunkand the national wavelength Deutsche Welle-re-examines
preciselythe ways "femininefrequencies"shift the relationbetweenpublicand
private. She then showsthe wayswomen'sradiowas appropriated by National
Socialismto shapea conservativelygenderedmergingof the two, wherehome
extendsto embracethe figurativeallegianceto the homelandand radio'spublic
voice reachesout to women,yet only to furtherenclosethem in the domestic
70 South
Central
Review
duties.
Oneof the mostimportantcontributions of Lacey'sstudylies in the continuities
and discontinuitiesshe tracesbetweenwomen'sprogiamiung as it was set up
duringthe WeimarRepublicandthe "tools"provided-bythis earlieruse of radio
as a publiccommunicator-forthe Nazi regime'ssubsequentre-articulations not
only of genderand technology,but also of radioitself as a technologyof gender
whichmandatedthe boundaries betweenprivateandpublic. Herapproachfocuses
here,as do the threeotherstudies,on fascism'speculiarideologicalspecificityof
non-specificity,definedas the re-articulating andbindingof pre-existingelements.
If the Frauenfunkprogrammingduring the WeimarRepublicwas explicitly
political even at a time when radiowas supposedlya non-politicalvehicle, as
Lacey very incisively points out, the programsmanaged by middle-class
housewives' unions did little to make the political synonymous with
progressiveness forwomen. Thenaturalizing discourseof householdadvice,albeit
highly political in a conservative sense, provideda matrixfor the disguiseof
politics as neutral good sense, one whichNationalSocialismlaterturnedto its
advantageby making the insidious organizingand literal programmingof the
housewife's domestic life a stabilizing and apparentlybenign ideological
structuring of the quotidian.Laceyputsthis very cogentlywhen she comments
that the banality Nazi ideologyover the airwavesmeantthat "thespacethat
of
women had carvedout within the broadcastpublic spherebecameexclusively
devotedto reinforcingwomen'sexclusionfrom the publicspherein a broader
sense"(125).
Wherea radio-transmitted politicsof the quotidianreconciledNazi ideology's
ostensible oppositionto women and politics throughthe politicizing of the
domestic sphere, the WeimarRepublic'searlier interpellationof women as
consumersalso takesa sharplypoliticizingturnduringthe ThirdReich. This it
doesthroughturningconsumption (of Germangoods)intoa nationalandpatriotic
duty: here women's radio redefines homeas Homeland,domesticaccountabilities
(householdbudgeting) as national responsibilities. Perhapsone of the most
interesting Nazi re-appropriations women'sradioanalyzedby Laceycomesin
of
ChapterEight,"Findinga Voice:Women'sRadioandthe Evolutionof Broadcast
Talk." Here, Lacey tracesthe ways the informalityof women's radio shows
introducedin the WeimarRepublic-the chitchat,gossip,heartto hearttoneof the
infomal chatshow-is takenoverin the Nazi regimeto naturalizepropagandist
content.Analyzingoneinstallmentof the longestrunningflagshipwomen'shour,
BunterNachmittag,Laceyshowshow using the speechpatternsof local dialects
andfade-insto createthe effectof joiningan ongoingconversationcontributed to
the simulatedinformalityof chat-shows,which were in fact scriptedfrom
beginningto end with Nazi propaganda to focus on women'sachievementsand
dutiesas a distractionfromtheirbasicreproductive functionin Nazi ideology.
WithLacey'sabsorbinganalysisof the Nazi regime's"domesticated formsof
address"to promotea "perniciousideology"of genderidentity(singular!)for
women throughtransformingErkenntnisgeist(the spirit of intellectualism)to
Muttergeist(the maternalspirit), we returnto our opening questionsabout
LizConstable 71

women'sre-articulations of the genderpoliticsof fascistfantasies(238). Andyet


we do so not on an entirelypessimisticnote. Spackmanshowsvery clearlythe
mixed ideologicalbag of women'srearticulations of fascism. Fascistfeminist,
TeresaLabriola,we recall, inheritingthe ideologicalconfusionof male fascist
fantasies,recastit as an anti-egalitarian
spiritualmaternityandyet, at the same
time, as a denaturalizedmaternity,therebydetachingsex and genderfrom a
constrainingnaturalizingcohesion.Likewise,despitethe waysin whichthe Nazi
regime used women's radio to naturalizeessentializedgender roles through
Lacey,in her studyof"femininefrequencies,"stresses
reiterativeinterpellations,
thatradioneverthelessremains,becauseratherthandespite,its abilityto function
as a technologyof gender,as mucha site for women'stransformation of fascist
fantasiesof naturalizedgenderidentitiesas it wasthe locusof theirreproduction.

NoTEs
t The following is a review essay of: MabelBerezin,
Making the Fascist Self: ThePolitical Culture
oflnterwarItaly. Ithaca:CornellUniversityPress, 1997. xv + 267 pp. $45.00 (cloth);$18.95 (paper);
Cinzia SartiniBlum, The OtherModernism:F.T. Marinetti'sFuturistFiction ofPower. Berkeley
andLos Angeles:Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1996. xii + 212 pp. $45.00 (cloth);$17:00 (paper);
Kate Lacey,Feminine Frequencies: Gender, GermanRadio, and the Public Sphere, 1923-1945.
Ann Arbor:The Universityof MichiganPress,1996. xiii + 299 pp. $49.50 (cloth);$24.95 (paper);and,
BarbaraSpackman,Fascist Virilities:Rhetoric,Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy. Minneapolis:
Universityof MinnesotaPress, 1996. xvi + 187 pp. $47.95 (cloth);$18.95 (paper).

1. Slavoj Zizek, The SublimeObjectof deology (New York:Verso, 1989).


2. Jean Laplancheand J. B. Pontalis, "Fantasyand the Origins of Sexuality," in Formations of
Fantasy, ed. VictorBurgin,JamesDonald,andCoraKaplan(New York:Routledge,1986).
3. Julia Kristeva,Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York:
ColumbiaUniversityPress, 1982); JessicaBenjamin,TheBonds of Love: Psychoanalysis,Feminism, and
theProblem ofDomination (New York:PantheonBooks, 1988).
4. Alice Yaeger Kaplan,Reproductions ofBanality: Fascism, Literature and French Intellectual
Life (Minneapolis:Universityof MinnesotaPress, 1986).
5. JudithButler,"ContingentFoundations,"inFeminists TheorizethePolitical, ed. JudithButlerand
JoanW. Scott (Routledge:New York, 1992), 3.
6. Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (New York: Farrar,Strauss &
Giroux, 1979), 19.
7. Paolo Valesio, Novantiqua: Rhetoric as a Contemporary Theory (Bloomington: Indiana
UniversityPress, 1980), 59.
8. KatherineVerdery,National Ideology under Socialism (Berkeley:Universityof CaliforniaPress,
1991), 247.
9. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (London:
Macmillan,1987).
10. AnthonyGiddens,Modernityand Self-Identity(Cambridge:Polity, 1991).

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