Strategy, Performance and Gender: An Interactionist Understanding of Young Activists within the Italian LGTB Movement and the Catholic Countermovement

This chapter investigates the linkages among the perceived experience of movement’s participants while simultaneously shedding light on the contingencies young protestors are confronted with in the process of negotiating their gender identities. The Catholic Church calls for politicians and citizens to support its positions, particularly in the realms of family, sexuality and gender equality. The ‘gender issue’ is diagnosed in Italy through a normative discourse where ‘gender theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ are explained by Catholic authorities as a postmodern social problem, a concrete manifestation of rampant individualism and relativism. Scholarship on youth and activism, gender and social movements, remarkably neglected to analyse how gender intervenes in the experience of young activists in Italy. A useful way to conceptualize gender and age is therefore to think of them not only as socially constructed, but also as performative, as part of each individual’s experience and of systems of power relations.