“Il numero come forza”: Medical Expertise and the Biopolitics of the Female Body in Benito Mussolini’s Battaglia Demografica - Juniper Publishers

“Il numero come forza”: Medical Expertise and the Biopolitics of the Female Body in Benito Mussolini’s Battaglia Demografica

Authored by Kylie Tora Basuki Liu

In his Ascension Day Speech, given before Parliament on 26th May 1927, Benito Mussolini dedicated most of the first half to an examination of the ‘crisis’ threatening the Italian populace in terms of its physical and racial wellbeing (“esame della situazione del popolo italiano dal punto divista della salute fisica e della razza”). Using predominantly medicalized terms, he described the nation as ridden with pellagra, tuberculosis, malignant tumours, malaria, alcoholism, and suicides. The underlying problem, he identified, was Italy’s declining birthrates - a sign of a dying nation, and offered himself as a cure. Calling himself “the doctor who does not overlook the symptoms, and these are the symptoms which should make us seriously reflect” (“io sono il clinico che non trascura i sintomi, e questi sono sintomi che ci devono fare seriamente riflettere”), the Duce proceeded to announce a series of legislative measures to encourage procreation, with the goal of boosting the Italian population from 40 million to 60 million by the mid-20th century [1]. These initiatives collectively formed Mussolini’s Demographic Campaign (battaglia demografica), a eugenics-based movement with the slogan “There is strength in numbers” (“il numero come forza”). The Fascist government viewed Italy as a “body to be protected and defended”, and intended to neutralize the threat to the nation through disciplining its citizenry into healthy, (re)productive men and women. Notably, they did so through medical expertise, using ‘scientific evidence’ by state-appointed physicians to justify their regulation of the body.

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