On masculinity and il Duce: If “it is through symbols that individuals are socialized – coming to share the rules, ideas, and values of the group as well as coming to learn their roles in relation to everyone else” (Charon 60), then it seems clear, in view of the frenetic propagandistic activity of Mussolini’s Fascist government and its promotion of him as the male model which all Italian men were to emulate, that Mussolini was indeed representative of hegemonic Italian masculinity, though that hegemony remained at least partially compromised, given that “Italian individualism, the fruit of secular, geographic, historical and cultural divisions, was perhaps the strongest obstacle to homogeneous transformations” (Gori 55) – (I would also add linguistic divisions as well, as this aspect is so crucial to regional identity). It might perhaps be more precise to contend that Mussolini was representative of a hegemonic masculinity that was imperfectly imposed upon the fractured, divided and divisive Italian populace. Gori goes so far as to claim that “[Italians] acted more like spectators than actors” (52) to the fascist enterprise. I find this attitude quite typically Italian, this shrug in the face of authority, a sort of noncompliance that may be politically motivated or not, but has as its effect the impotence of any governing body to unite the Italian people under one ideology or concept of the nation.
Mangan identifies as endemic to all fascist enterprises the concept of “the martial male body as a symbol of state power: his powerful body personified the powerful state.” Mussolini, in contrast to the rather prim Franco and the decidedly unathletic Hitler, incarnated the state through the representation of his body as virile, athletic, and robust. “During the years of his government, Mussolini showed himself to the world, as an outstanding athlete… He had himself photographed while running with soldiers, skiing… and revealing his naked torso without embarrassment” (Gori 43) – it is difficult (and not a little nauseating) to imagine either Franco or Hitler displaying their bodies in this way, though Putin is happily emulating him.
It is also worth noting that this quasi-worship of the youthful, athletic male body – whether the Duce’s body, usually filmed from below “in order to lengthen his rather stumpy figure” (Gori 37) or the nude colossi designed by Enrico del Debbio – was ambivalent. To cite one example, there was intense anxiety around the homoeroticism of these figures and a particularly strong reaction against more Nazi-inflected art featuring nudes because the “beautiful and muscular nudes suggested to Italian minds homoerotic sexual tendencies” (Gori 54) and this taboo, like the negative reaction towards the Nazi-influenced anti-Semitic race laws, ultimately weakened Mussolini’s hold on the Italian political imagination.
In contrast to Hitler’s goal of “the supremacy of the Aryan race in the world… the Duce’s aim remained substantially the transformation of his people’s character” (Gori 53); this aim was not accomplished. Mussolini succeeded to an astonishing degree in his endeavor to be the living embodiment of the Fascist ideology, but “isolated like a god on his Olympus,” (Gori 38) he doomed the Fascist state by becoming it. If Fascist Italy and Fascist ideology ARE Mussolini, a mortal man if a god-like one, then they too are mortal and therefore doomed to meet their end.
