2.12 Questioning Power Hierarchies

Michael Davidson and Literary Pederasty in Italy

Sergio Rigoletto, PhD, 17 June 2005,
One Day Conference on 'Gender', University of Sussex - Abstract

This paper offers an overview of the complex power dynamics at play in homo-erotic desire and encounter within a long tradition of literary pederasty in the Mediterranean.

Through an analysis of Michael Davidson's memoirs, The World, the Flesh and Myself (1962) and Some Boys (1970), this paper examines Davidson's relationship with some Italian adolescents during his long stay in Southern Italy and the inevitable resulting power hierarchies binding a wealthy middle-aged writer and a number of underprivileged Italian boys.

Contemporary discourses of power difference, gender and sexuality are particularly problematic when dealing with age difference and masculinity. Culturally dominant interpretations of gender relationships between an older and a younger subject generally seem to work through binaries: the former is seen as the dominant and the seducer, while the latter as the subordinate, desired object.

By making use of the recent critical contributions focusing on power, gender and age difference by Sedgwick, Dollimore and Segal, my aim is to see whether positions of dominance within hierarchies may be contested and re-interpreted.

I will explore gender spaces in which power does not necessarily correspond to abuse and see how conditions of subordination and authority may lose their essential static opposition along a heterogeneous spectrum of male performances.