Pinks, Purples and Shades of Porpora: The Life of Porpora Marcasciano and the Work of Trans Activism

Abstract

In 2022, Porpora Marcasciano is a living legend whose activism for the rights of the trans community in Italy has been the driving force behind the civil rights and liberties achieved over almost half a century of militancy. This chapter on Marcasciano’s life in activism for trans visibility and rights draws from her five books (to date), webinars, online interviews, recorded lectures, and my interview with her. It maps the chronology of trans activism through the evolution of her thought and experiences, actualized through the creation of organizations and political work that have rendered trans identities visible. Marcasciano’s prescient trans agenda charts the ultimate frontier of inclusion whose parameters and possibilities define, better than any other, the trajectory of the human subject in the twenty-first century.

When you enter activist and writer Porpora Marcasciano’s (1957–) office at the Municipality of Bologna, the first thing you notice on the wall behind her desk is a black poster with white lettering: TRANS, e basta. (TRANS, and nothing else.) Below the large lettering, the following expansion: La cultura patriarcale ha decretato che l’identità di genere è binaria. Noi siamo trans! Il nostro genere e la nostra identità non sono barattabili. Noi esistiamo. (Patriarchal culture has decreed that gender identity is binary. We are trans! Our gender and our identity are non-negotiable. We exist.)¹ Seeing her together with the poster was a defining moment, the embodiment of language—Porpora and the words of her life’s work—in Palazzo d’Accursio (also known as Palazzo Comunale), headquarters of Bologna’s municipal government since 1325, now a building where activism for inclusivity takes place every day.² The poster marked the 2021 film festival Divergenti, held in Bologna between December 2nd and 4th. It is the only trans film festival in Italy and among the few in the world dedicated to the narration and representation of the trans experience.

This eleventh edition of the Bologna festival with its stark poster was realized by MIT—Movimento Identità Trans (Trans Identity Movement) under the direction of Nicole De Leo, president, and Porpora, vice president. The fact that the film festival had made it to its eleventh edition is significant, as is the fact that it was co-organized in Bologna by Porpora, one of the pillars of MIT, making it a way to celebrate a defining moment in Porpora’s career as a trans activist. Porpora intended to let people know that her activist agenda knew no bounds as she describes the thinking behind the poster for Divergenti 2021: “Divergenti 2021 has set aside the images and colors typical of its posters over the years, replacing them with black, the color of the void and negation. Black underscores the gravity of this moment and denounces oppressive backlashes by putting the word TRANS in the center and nothing else” (“Trans, e basta”).

Porpora’s decades of activism to render trans identities visible in Italian politics and society had reached a pinnacle in the preceding months with her election in October 2021 to the City Council of Bologna, followed by her appointment a few weeks later, on November 11, as President of the Commission for Equal Rights on that council. Porpora’s incorporation into official ranks of the city government in Bologna has brought her and trans rights a level of global visibility that marks the pinnacle of her success, a crowning achievement for everything she has fought for. Time and again, the name of Porpora Marcasciano emerges as the one to be reckoned with if we are ready to explore gender and accept how its parameters and possibilities define, better than any other, the trajectory of the human subject in the twenty-first century. Her 2021 recognition by the United Nations as one of the seven most influential trans activists in the world, together with accolades received from Amnesty International further attest to her work (Fig. 24.1).

Fig. 24.1

Porpora Marcasciano wearing a pin “mit Favolosa”. MIT stands for Movimento Identità Trans (Trans Identity Movement). Combined with the term “Favolosa”, or Fabulous, a term she has resignified to indicate open pride in oneself, “mit Favolosa” has become a slogan for trans activism. (Photo by Nina Zara. Courtesy of personal archive of Porpora Marcasiano)

Porpora is an activist for trans (she prefers trans as a term that is all-inclusive of transgender, transsexual, transvestite, etc., though in her writing and speaking she uses all of them) and is known through her activism. However, the activist label can be a liability that allows for easy recognition, without prompting an exploration of the activist subject’s commitment to ideals, and the daily work required. This chapter offers a brief biographical sketch to explain how she began the work of trans activism and the evolution of its features in Italy. I focus on that work to determine and describe the tools, practices, and results that she has created and honed during her career, which includes the transnational dimension, through her representative work as the spokesperson for Italian transgender on a global stage. As the recent world debate about transgender demonstrates, trans is the gender identity that exacts the greatest investment of intent on the part of layperson and government to understand. Among the hallmarks of Porpora’s contribution is the capacious set of parameters that she ascribes to the term: we might propose that her definition of the term transcends gender, inviting everyone to move into and through gender to the extent and in the way that they wish. This aspect of her gender philosophy is grounded in her personal gender trajectory and the socio-political context in which she evolved, not to mention her studies in anthropology, sociology, and history, as well as the activism that has been a feature of her engagement with the world from adolescence onward. The joyful flow and ring of her prose is matched by the warmth of her voice, including the welcoming you receive if you are fortunate to meet her, which I was able to do while writing this chapter. Porpora’s ongoing success as an activist includes elements that all leaders of revolutionary movements possess, including the intertwining of the personal and political and the ability to establish a new language and terminology for what they are experiencing on their own skin and in their bodies, in ways that increasingly resonate with others the world over, indifferent to generation, race, class, or gender identity. Her observations and evolving embodied experiences speak to the moment we are living in, one that at many levels is described through the words, reflections, voice, body, and activism of Porpora.

Finding Her “Collocazione” (Place): The Early Years

Porpora has become the living memory of the trajectory of personal discovery of a generation in the 1970s and the articulation of the continuity of that trajectory up to the present. Her 2014 AntoloGaia. Vivere sognando e non sognare di vivere: i miei anni settanta, the autobiography Porpora wrote about her early years of personal reckoning and sexual and political activism, bears witness to that time and the unfolding of its meaning. She narrates early memories of being divergente (divergent), a term she has infused with trans meaning as exemplified by the title of the trans film festival, Divergenti. Porpora is often asked about the moment she knew she was trans: “It wasn’t a sudden discovery; it has been with me my entire life. At some point during adolescence, between the ages of 14 and 15, an empowering awareness occurred, rather than a discovery” (Costanzo, 2022). She explains that it was not a discovery but something she had always felt, which was her normal, but during adolescence, the period in which people compare themselves to each other and peer groups form, she began to understand that her being was socially rejected as non-conforming to binary thinking.

In that moment she begins to search for community, leading her to discover others like her, and to understanding that the problem was not hers, for she felt perfectly sane in her sense of self, but rather the problem of a society that made of her identity a pathology. AntoloGaia is a fundamental text in understanding her trajectory as activist and the premises upon which her activism is based. It is a testament to embodiment as a methodological trope, for she understood that her body contained her experiences as a vessel of practice, as well as the vessel that held her thoughts and could articulate them. Porpora writes the body as agent of activism and practice. This performative writing emerges out of everything that she lived, experienced, and performed. This practice became her way of knowing, also for those who were like her. The realization that millions of people all over the world were like her sparked her understanding that they, like her had suffered, and were suffering from social rejection and isolation. Activism was required to make them visible. Her activism began as an activism of rendering visible, first to themselves, as trans, then to others, that trans is deserving of rights and social services. Porpora’s writing of the 1970s carries the rhetorical elements of revolutionary leaders who have changed our way of seeing, hearing, and discussing our world; like revolutionaries before her, she unveils discrepancies in our previously held notions of world order. She has created and codified the language of trans and made trans identities visible and enduring. She describes the effort of surviving, of avoiding being stamped out by others, and how different things were for anyone trans during her youth: “Being diverse in the 70s was obviously very different from today because at the time, there were no points of reference; the word ‘Transsexual’ only came into usage later, together with so many others. Thus, the feeling of loneliness was thorough and complete because you were just left dangling out there in the dark” (Ibid.).

Porpora’s ability to communicate the visual and spatial effects of her life in her home village of San Bartolomeo in Gualdo lies at the interstices of three different Italian regions, Campania, Molise, and Puglia, in the land called Sannio in ancient times. She proudly notes that it is hybrid, like herself, its people, the Sanniti, infamous as anarchists, witches, and brigands, appellations that resonate with her. Porpora revels in relating the history of the land of her origins, its rugged, mountainous Appennine terrain and its notoriety as a place marked in red on early twentieth-century maps to signal the danger it harbored. Porpora is proud of her origins and the iconoclastic make-up of her hometown, which she emphasizes, should never be lumped in with any one of the regions it touches. She reports that until the age of 19, she was happy living there, and explains how San Bartolomeo in Gualdo, true to its anarchical reputation, was home to avant-garde citizens, including those who set up a club-like space open 24 hours a day where young people gathered to talk, listen to music, and imagine their lives outside of the paese (town) of some 5000 inhabitants. Reading Porpora, one is immediately struck by her attachment to her local and national roots, for she has written the Italian playbook for trans rights, her point of departure for the umbrella of trans identity that transcends borders, hence her suggestion that MIT, which originally stood for Movimento Italiano Transsessuali, change Italiano to Identità.

The intensity of adolescence with its mix of physical and intellectual stimuli, punctuated by music and the connection provided in the aftermath of post-1968 movements and its effects on those who came up on its heels is a piece of personal history and an important piece of Italian youth history. Porpora is attentive to her journey’s prosopographical dimension, weaving a narrative of solidarity as she uses her intelligence and experience to establish trans history for the ages. Porpora’s inability to find her place, her collocazione (one of the terms that define the repertoire of trans history and presence, the vocabulary of trans), made her a seeker of that place, on a personal and then collective level, when she realized that she had the capacity and charisma to articulate a position. She found the media, the words, and music that in the early 1970s made for a powerful mediatic fusion that became the basis for her activism (Fig. 24.2).

Fig. 24.2

Porpora Marcasciano in Stonewall t-shirt, commemorating the watershed moment on June 28, 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in New York City when uprisings of the LGBTQ community took place throughout the city to protest attempts to arrest those who patronized the bar. (Photo by Nina Zara. Courtesy of personal archive of Porpora Marcasiano)

Intelligent, open, and an organizer at school assemblies, she began to experience the hypocrisy of those who wanted to share sexual experiences with her in the dark but who, in the light of day, bullied and ridiculed her. She was accused of being homosexual and measures were taken to expel her. In that moment, she realized that she had no language for dirsi, narrating herself in defense of who she is. She connected her personal struggle to others. Two events brought the need for activism into focus: the brutal 1973 coup in Chile and the murder of author, poet, and director Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975. The latter prompted her coming out in solidarity with Pasolini during an assembly in her scientific high school. In that moment, she understood the importance of collective visibility as the best way to ensure that the trampling of a person’s right to exist and bear witness to the way they feel and identify would be protected. Only through militancy together with those who demanded to live and be recognized for come si sentono (how they feel) moved her. There would be no going back. Today there are 400,000 people who identify as trans in Italy. The fact that they are standing up to be counted is tangible proof of the effects of Porpora’s activism, which began in the crucible of the 1970s liberation movements throughout the world, the redux of 1968. Her anni settanta (1970s) echo with familiarity for anyone who lived through those times. The pain of holding divergent ideas from the generation of their parents prompted teenagers and young adults to demonstrate. The pain was matched by the joy of finding community, forging a politics of sharing, knowing, and helping, which electrified youth culture in the 1970s in Italy, as in the novel Porci con le ali (1976), which recounts the political and sexual activism that made the Roman high school Mamiani legendary. And while it may seem like a cliché to talk about drugs, sex, and rock and roll, Porpora infuses political meaning in that threesome of terms, showing us their potential and how she molded the potential they offered as tools for seekers, building from them a platform for her activism.

Historical Conditions, Trailblazers, Naples, Rome, and Bologna

Porpora recognizes the historical conditions under which her activism took root and evolved, and those whose mantle she has taken up. Her acute awareness of history and the importance of reconstructing the history that has been denied trans people is among the tenets of her activism. Without a history and a historical awareness of trans practice and culture, both of which have been suppressed, it is impossible to find one’s place (collocazione). That history is rich with intellectuals and activists from the second half of the twentieth century, but also sex workers and prostitutes whose life stories she told in her 2002 volume Tra le rose e le viole. La storia e le storie di transessuali e travestiti, republished in 2020 with a new preface. Tre le rose e le viole is again a book she wrote from personal experience articulated in its collective echo. But first, some of the activism that preceded her own.

In her writing and interviews, Porpora cites people whose work and activism were pathbreaking for her. Among them, activist and intellectual Mario Mieli (1952–1983) whose 1977 book, Elementi di critica omosessuale is often cited as the cornerstone of queer activism in Italy. His story shares elements with Porpora’s 1970s awakening: activism to reverse the accusations of homosexuality as mental illness, travels to London to experience English gay activism and the founding of organizations and publications that would carry the work forward.³ While a number of Mieli’s provocations and fraught family relations had buried his ideas until the film about his life, Gli anni amari, appeared in 2020, Porpora, five years Mieli’s junior, has been able to carry forward a less threatening and therefore more palatable agenda of liberation to the mainstream, without betraying the basic goal of freeing people from rigid gender identities, monolithic thinking, and stringent binaries. Her subchapter on the legacy of his work in AntoloGaia notes how far ahead of the times he was with his groundbreaking vision that linked sexuality and revolution and his insights on gender fluidity and the cultural construction of the gender binary (Marcasciano, 2014, 174).

From the time Porpora attended university in Naples, taking courses in anthropology and sociology and finishing with a degree in sociology from the University of Rome, activism went hand in hand with her studies. Many of her professors participated but activism had already begun in high schools throughout Italy, and hers was no exception. Students began mobilizing in high school, seamlessly transitioning to more radical mobilizations once at the university and away from home. Porpora’s activism and militancy during her university years are crucial in this regard, although she makes a distinction between the activism of the 1970s, with its generational outrage over social injustice and denied rights for ethnic, sexual, political, and social reasons and the concrete forms of activism that would become her life’s work, much of it realized through MIT, the most enduring and important of the many organizations she founded with others during her years of activism in Rome.

The most important mentor in Porpora’s life, however, is role model Marcella Di Folco, the Italian trans activist who would be the first to occupy a seat on the city council in Bologna. She pays homage to Marcella’s winning strategies in Bologna that she would later emulate: “Marcella had clearly understood that the winning strategy was that of coming out of oblivion, mincing no words, refusing to settle for less, and instead, setting her sights high, further than anyone had every dared reach before” (Marcasciano, 2018, 171).

Marcella’s visible form of activism and subsequent acquisition of a formal place in government are credited by Porpora with creating the momentum that has made Bologna the site for an activist agenda with concrete outcomes for the right of trans citizens to possess access to health care, counseling, social services, legal advice and support, and ever greater visibility. Porpora’s transformative role in MIT is the brand of militancy she learned from Marcella. There could be no better way of underscoring Marcella’s decisive strategies of trans visibility than to mention the dedication of a public square, in the gardens at Villa Casarini, to the trans activist who died in 2010. The mayor of Bologna, Virginio Merola, dedicated the space on July 1, 2021, the eve of the Gay Pride March that year. It was titled Rivolta Pride (Pride Revolt) in 2021 to underscore the political dimension of LGBTQI activism in Bologna and the taking of a firm stance against the backlash of repression (Camparsi & Gonzato, 2021).

Sex Workers’ Rights Are Human Rights

Other activists whose example has proven instructive are former prostitutes Maria Pia Covre and Carla Corso, who founded in 1982 the Comitato per i diritti civili delle prostitute (CDCP) (Committee for the civil rights of prostitutes) to provide support “to all people working as prostitutes.”⁴ This inclusive definition of prostitution as a profession not only practiced by women but also by trans people and gay men, brought together Marcella, Porpora, Maria Pia, and Carla. In AntoloGaia, Porpora describes her 17-year stint as a sex worker, and while her work in the sex trade came from financial need, she emphasizes that it was the form of employment she chose, one that is valid, but that often exploits migrants and the marginalized who, by definition, are women, trans, and gay. Porpora discusses the joint effort mounted by Marcella, Maria Pia, Carla, and herself in the early days of activism in 1982, commandeered by Marcella from her bed, where interviews, meetings, telephone calls, and organizational plans would talk place:

The discussion we had with Pia and Carla Corso, our closest friends in absolute, the pillars of the Committee on civil rights for prostitutes, aimed at constructing something—what wasn’t entirely clear to us yet—that would protect the rights of women workers of the trans sex, women and transvestites dressed as women. (Marcasciano, 2018, 173)

Marcella’s politics of visibility is used in the case of the prostitutes to move the issues into public debate. The struggle undertaken for prostitutes would pave the way for the success of MIT some 12 years later in 1994. Porpora describes the concatenation of these events:

At the moment in which the phenomenon reached its maximum visibility, with a massive exodus of sex workers and a macroscopic and unmanageable presence in the streets, a path was being forged that would enable MIT and the Committee to present to the entire municipality of Bologna during a press conference an important document that would be crucial in the creation of all future projects. (Marcasciano, 2018, 173–174)

Like Porpora, Maria Pia and Carla have worked tirelessly to raise awareness about prostitution and its public destigmatization. They emphasize that prostitution is often a free choice as a form of employment among women, transsexuals, cis, and gay men. They note the paradox of prostitution not being considered a crime in Italy, but on the flip side, the lack of rights for those who seek employment as sex workers. Since it is not recognized as work, there are no pensions or health benefits for people who work as prostitutes. As Porpora has noted, prostitutes pay taxes.

Porpora has explored all aspects of prostitution, from the cultural, to the economic, to the moral. She is adamant about the false morality that surrounds prostitution in Italy, bolstering her discussion with the results of a survey taken of actresses in Italy who indicated prostitute at the top of their list of most desirable roles. As an astute cultural historian, Porpora is quick to note the amount of world literature and cinema whose protagonists are prostitutes. Porpora condemns a society that no longer recognizes prostitutes by their names, such as Cabiria in Fellini’s eponymous film, but rather depersonalizes them by referring to them by their nationality or ethnicity, for example, the Romanians, the Nigerians, and so on. She notes that Pasolini had warned us about the dangers of a culture of globalization that tends toward the generic and no longer recognizes the specificity of the person, never calling people by name, one of the foundational axes of her activism and militancy for visibility. The individual is always important in the collective. Among the most salient areas of Porpora’s activism is the fight for working visas for prostitutes who are not recognized as Italian citizens, so that they can leave the shadows of trafficking that has become an even more alienating layer of their lives in Italy, rendering access to social services more arduous.⁵

MIT Bologna

The beautiful website for MIT https://mit-italia.it/chi-siamo/ defines itself as one of the most important and oldest associations of the Italian LGBTQ+ movement. Founded in 1979 (with the original name Movimento Italiano Transsessuali), it proved the power of activism with, only a few years later, the passing of Law 164 in 1982, which allowed people to change their gender. The movement fought for the rights and dignity of trans people to make decisions about their lives and determine how they want to live their future lives. Today, the Bologna MIT center operates on a national level under its current name, Movimento Identità Trans, which was the brainchild of Porpora. The website is the best testimonial to the activist work being done by MIT today, with projects that recognize the manifestations of trans, but primarily, the right for people to present themselves the way they feel. The law has evolved in this regard, and now, a person can change their gender without undergoing surgery, which had been a requirement of the law when it was first approved in 1982. Modifications in 2011 and 2015 have made the law more inclusive, yet, as MIT activists know, there is room for improvement. Nevertheless, MIT and Bologna are inseparable in their activist goals, which Porpora, as city council member and representative of equal rights in the Municipality of Bologna, consistently articulates. As president of MIT from Marcella’s death in 2010 until 2016, and currently its vice president, Porpora’s work for trans rights continues at an intensive rhythm. In L’Aurora delle trans cattive, she waxes poetic when speaking about MIT:

I have to admit that when I stop to think about my history with Mit, all kinds of feelings and emotions run through me because I feel like an integral part of it. For almost thirty-five years, my life and the life of Mit have been inextricably intertwined through many of my own political and cultural transitions, as well as those of the entire trans world and movement. (Marcasciano, 2018, 179–180)

Porpora credits MIT with the evolution of her activist consciousness as the site of political activism for the trans explosion that coalesced around the time of its founding. She understands how the birth of MIT became a defining moment for thousands of people in Italy in the early 1980s who finally understood who they were, for, as Porpora stated, “No one takes political action if they don’t know who they are” (Marcasciano, 2014, 102). MIT launched awareness, action and trans history, and in many ways her involvement in MIT marks the official beginning of Porpora’s political activism. With the realization of what MIT was able to do to promote the passing of the Law 164 in 1982, Porpora became one of its primary activists, working alongside the friends cited earlier. Since then, she has channeled much of her political activism through MIT, with numerous concrete projects and services now available that she either created or facilitated over 40 years of advocacy and activism within the organization. She often mentions the importance of MIT being assigned a permanent headquarters on Via Polese by the Municipality of Bologna in 1994 as a turning point in the organization’s ability to serve the trans community (Marcasciano, 2018, 174).

Names, Words, Saying, Telling, and Naming Oneself

Porpora’s fascination with words and the importance of “telling oneself and naming oneself” (Voli, 2017, 18) was burnished within the experience of her own naming as Porpora, after the voce bianca, the soprano voice of the castrato singer Porporino, who holds a mythical place in Neapolitan cultural and musical history. Porpora tells the story of her naming as an event that links her with her mentor, professor, and eventually close friend and lover Pino Simonelli during her first year at the university in Naples. Simonelli was a cultural anthropologist and expert on the femminielli of Naples, men who considered themselves women and were accepted as such with the name, in Neapolitan dialect, of femminiello. From Porporino, the name became Porpora, or purple, the color of revolution, as Porpora has noted.⁶ Simonelli’s work has been an essential component in the formation of the trans archive and trans history. Porpora’s naming conflates all these elements as one of the most important moments in her evolution into activism. Porpora has been systematic in her use of language in her books and speech. She has brought into the mainstream a trans vocabulary and terminology, such as her usage of the term froscia (feminizing the Italian term froscio for gay to add the feminine dimension) and the term queer in a more all-inclusive term for non-codified gender. Her books are filled with the names of her trans friends, family, and compagne (partners), listed in an appendix at the end of AntoloGaia under the rubric Personaggi (Characters): Ilaria, Lud, Medusa, Merdaiola, Penny Arcade, and Prussy, together with Angela Davis, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marco Sanna, Monique Wittig, and many others. Her list of characters follows the alphabetical order of their first names, to emphasize the personal connection she has or had with them, giving them an immediacy for the reader that last name first never confers. When talking about language and Porpora, we would be remiss were we to leave out the word she has completely resignified: Favolosità, favoloso/a as an embracing of all of one’s savvy, mojo, and sass in a naturalness and combined ability to perform oneself and embody one’s state of mind and being that is comparable to Renaissance writer Baldassarre Castiglione’s use of sprezzatura to refer to the courtier who exudes confidence, know-how, and brilliance in every word and gesture.

Conclusion

At this time of tremendous change and rethinking about what constitutes italianità (Italianness), women’s work in transgender Italy offers a critical chapter that redraws the foundations of Italian identity, projecting our thinking into a future whose contours have been rendered visible through Porpora’s work. Her work is women’s work, and we say that with the full awareness of the qualities that she truly embodies and that we identify as women’s qualities—most especially, a propensity for care in all its forms: care of the self, herself, care of her friends, compagne, froscie, trans, her family, whose creation and life she has defined, described, and introduced to the world in her books. What is the next chapter in Porpora’s passaggi (transitions)? How do her personal evolution and the evolution of the movement line up? In her latest book and recent interviews, she gives voice to hope and her belief in the future as a place where solutions are found. Trans is very visible now in Italy, and she is thoroughly inclusive in her definition of trans as containing gay, lesbian, and all trans identities, whether mediated through surgery or hormones or not. While this consolidation gives her great joy, she is aware of the amount of work that is yet to be done and the threats that hover: “Today we even have words to tell ourselves, to name ourselves, but that vile prejudice against us still sticks around, showing up here and there…” (Bova, 2022, 1:15). The work will not be done until everyone can feel good about who they are. Yet, a tinge of regret can be felt in her most recent writings and interviews about the danger that present generations will forget this fragile history, whose foundation needs to be strengthened and grown: “I increasingly give up when faced with the arrogance of those who, in the name of a questionable and false self-determination, systematically destroy the progress we have made and the ground we have conquered by not recognizing it, thereby unwittingly eliminating all previous gains” (Marcasciano, 2018, 184). But Porpora’s pessimism is always short lived and her need to communicate, advocate, and find solutions prevails. In a recent interview, she jokes that she has been accused of “having too much humanity” (Talk, 2020, 1:12:18), referring to the power of her belief in humanity, the right to be free, and her unrelenting activism to achieve those goals.