The Italian Empire and Its Legacies

The Italian empire’s relationship to sexualities and genders is examined in Chapter 11, focusing on colonized territories in Eritrea and Libya, and the short-lived Fascist occupation of Ethiopia. “Homosexuality” did not emerge as a concern for colonial governance, which usually did not interfere with African sexualities, unless interracial intimacies challenged racial hierarchies. Sexualities and genders outside heterosexual norms were not always stigmatized in colonized societies, especially within religious rituals where the spiritual place of crossing gender binaries was present. However, legal and social regulation of sexualities and genders was “the result of multiple colonizations and the intertwining of different imperial histories and temporalities.” After World War II, influenced by foreign sources, Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie introduced articles concerning illicit sexual practices in the revised penal code (1957), also in Eritrea. Regarding Libya, the chapter explores modernized Islamic norms to understand factors explaining criminalization of same-sex relations.