Eterotopie quotidiane: Foucault tra critica e postcritica, le iene nella sauna e il sesso anonimo tra maschi

In May 2016, the Italian Parliament ruled in favour of a poor and ultimately discriminatory law on civil partnerships, which does not recognize to same sex couples a family status, but nevertheless constitutes an important step towards full citizenship for sexual minorities. Television initially reacted with a proliferation of moving and edifying programs celebrating lesbian and gay couples’ love. But after less than one year, a big media scandal occurred, involving ‘gay saunas’ – private clubs where only men are admitted, mostly not seeking love, but fast sexual intercourses. Why does anonymous sex between males keep on disturbing the same public that is touched by stories of televised gay couples and their love dream turned into second class marriage? In order to answer this question, the theoretical tools of both critique and postcritique seem not to be adequate. In particular the progressive politicization of sexuality seems not, the one that Michel Foucault shares with many critic heirs of his thought (Lisa Duggan, Jasbir Puar), but also with a postcritic author like Davina Cooper. The article offers an alternative perspective, starting from a situated and participating point of view and employing the psychoanalytic understanding of sex developed by so called antisocial queer theories (Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman). In so doing, it gives the example of a kind of intellectual who is different from both the critic and the postcritic intellectual described by Bruno Latour – showing how much the two actually have in common.