Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Il diverso (the different one)

2023; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/frm.2023.a914996

1559-7989

Susan Potter,

Italian Literature and Culture

Il diverso (the different one) Susan Potter The flesh lodges a reading regime and contains a powerful way of seeing, through invisible eyes. —Maurizio Viano, A Certain Realism1 Everyone knows that Pier Paolo Pasolini was a homo, but no one knows how to talk about it. It is avoided or acknowledged before moving on to more serious, less vulgar things—poetry, cinema, reality. The proper name Pasolini often appears in a list alongside Cocteau, Genet, Rimbaud—and let's also add Pasolini fan Bruce LaBruce—as writers, artists, and filmmakers who all stand in for the "amoral 'criminal' expression of desire."2 Pasolini's sexual notoriety, his love of young rough trade, further amplified by lurid rumors of paid communal sexual practices, aka circle jerks, was perversely sanctified by his killing, its sensational publicity, and the never-ending will to know the truth of What Really Happened.3 Homosexuality as discourse, characterized by now seemingly outmoded twentieth-century registers of suspicion and connotation, continues to motor this everlasting speculation.4 The image of Pasolini's dead, mutilated body is a stunning stun-grenade tossed into our contemporary happy story of marriage equality and genderqueer diversity. His body suffers, unjustly, unbearably, the disciplining forces of modernizing societies—including homosexual discourse itself—enacted by various informal, media, or state-sanctioned agents. It's hard not to see Pasolini's lifeless body as the condensation of all the violence he endured in his lifetime, an [End Page 144] attempt to obliterate the memory of his tenacity, a testament to his persistent will to be. As Maurizio Viano reminds us, "He was tried thirty-three times—once even after his death—in a grotesque ritual in which power merely aimed at reinforcing its (self)image as power."5 Being brutally outed, however damaging and difficult that was for the young poet, seems to have been the catalyst for the development of a particular Pasolinian style of publicity and bravado. It is another gay artist, John Di Stefano, who has most perceptively drawn attention to the significance of Pasolini's sexuality for his intellectual and creative projects. As Di Stefano writes, "Pasolini was homosexual, but there was no precedent for the type of homosexual he embodied, nor the version of masculinity he proposed."6 Di Stefano curates this embodiment in two incompatible images that he brings together at the end of his essay/performance text "Picturing Pasolini"—an image of the gay writer/filmmaker and an image of the dead queer or finocchio.7 In the first image, by Dino Pedriali, the director sits naked on the end of a bed reading a book, his legs splayed open to reveal his sex, what was always promised but never revealed in the infamous trope of crotch shots in Teorema/Theorem (Pier Paolo Pasolini, IT, 1968). Created as part of a series commissioned by Pasolini for a larger project, the photograph, as Di Stefano points out, "satirizes the very notion that [Pasolini's] (gay) body is separable from his intellect, or that the (gay) body perverts the mind of an otherwise brilliant poet and filmmaker."8 On the following page of his text, Di Stefano reproduces the police photograph of Pasolini's dead body as it was discovered in early November 1975 in Ostia, close to a popular seaside resort southwest of Rome. His justification for this second difficult-to-view and hard-to-forget image: despite all of the discursive work it performs as proof of the justifiable fate of queers, as license to gay hate, as perverse evidence for straight minds of perversion, as warning to those who challenge the social order, it has become counterintuitively valued as a gay image of resistance, like that of the dead body of Che Guevara.9 Bringing together this incommensurable pair of images is one of Di Stefano's queer methods for ensuring that we keep in mind Pasolini's gay bodies, their complicated liveliness and deadness. Their posthumous publication in the essay and accompanying performance tape is a way of extending beyond his lifetime Pasolini's autonomous tactic of homo publicity, a kind of evasive guerrilla-style alterity. During Pasolini's lifetime and after his death...