A Family Matter: Asymmetrical Metonymy and Regional LGBT Discourse in Italy

• In Event: 059 - Regular Session. Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies

Abstract

Culture has been understood as a key concept motivating, shaping, and limiting social movements since the emergence of collective behavior models and resource mobilization models in the 1970s (McCarthy and Zald 1977). In this research, I take the LGBT movement in Italy as a case study to investigate the way culture shapes movement strategy at the discursive level, creating boundaries separating the sayable from the unsayable in the public sphere.
More specifically, I focus on the way activist groups deal with regionally diversified cultural constraints shaping the discursive environment in which a social movement operates: movements rarely work on a single scale, and they are much more likely to operate in different social environments governed by varying cultural assumptions and conventions. National movements in federated countries, for example, operate both on a national scale and at the level of a single state—dealing with strikingly different cultural norms depending on location. If culture limits what can and cannot be said, how do movements make sense of the different limitations? What mechanism allows activists to develop a discourse that maximizes both cultural and policy outcomes while simultaneously avoiding discursive fragmentation?
Drawing on a combination of social movement and communication studies literature to approach discourse as an indicator of strategy, I argue that supporters of civil rights in different Italian regions relied on the conversational mechanism of metonymy to reconcile contentious concepts with specific regional cultural assumptions, and specifically with different understanding of family.

Author

• Caterina Fugazzola, University of Chicago