‘We should tax sex workers to fund subsidies for families’: shifting affective registers and enduring (sexual) norms in the Italian Northern League’s approach to prostitution

ABSTRACT

This paper explores changes in the emotional and affective repertoires mobilized by the Northern League, a radical right-wing populist party in Italy, to justify its recent prostitution policy proposal. Having dispensed to alarge extent with the punitive and fearful rhetoric against migrant prostitution that characterized its previous campaigns, under its new leader the Northern League has been calling for the regulation of prostitution and for its profitable taxation. The measures proposed, far from being non-moralistic and ideologically neutral, as they are presented, reinforce awell-established normative dichotomy between potentially dangerous individuals and the supposedly wholesome family.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotional politics
• governing through affect
• taxation of prostitution
• prostitution policy
• sexual norms

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Caterina Fantacci for her support in collecting the data analysed and the Independent Social Research Foundation for supporting the research project ‘Comparing the taxation of prostitution in Europe: experiences and negotiations with laws and fiscal arrangements’ from which this article emerges.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Law 75 of 1958, the so-called Merlin Law, named after Senator Lina Merlin who proposed it, is Italy’s main piece of legislation specifically addressing prostitution. It abolished the regulationist system that had been in place in the country since the 1860s. It does not criminalize prostitution but bans brothels and criminalizes most prostitution-related activities, including soliciting, aiding and abetting and profiting from the prostitution of others (Crowhurst, Testai’, Di Feliciantonio, Garofalo Geymonat, 2017).

2. The terms were searched for in Italian, thus: ‘prostituzione’, ‘Merlin’, ‘prostituta’ and ‘prostitute’, and sex work in English (which was found in one tweet only).

3. All documents originally in Italian have been translated by the author.

4. Capitalized letter in the original in this and other cited tweets.

5. The collection of signatures pertained to the repeal of five different laws, each addressing a distinct issue.

6. This term is widely used in Italy. It originally indicated anyone who is not from the European Union, but soon became adopted with a derogatory meaning to characterize unwanted ‘foreigners’ who do not belong.

7. Italy was struck hard by the 2007 global financial crisis as a result of which it was hit by a number of recessions. To this day the country’s economy remains very weak, contributing to low productivity and high unemployment (Catanzaro 2018).

8. The tweets mentioned here were posted before the Northern League entered in the coalition government in 2018.

9. This is the only tweet on the matter posted in English language. It is also the only one where Matteo Salvini uses the term ‘sex worker’; when writing in Italian he uses the still more broadly adopted, term prostitute/s (gendered female).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Isabel Crowhurst

Isabel Crowhurst is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex, UK. Her research explores the intersection of sexual and economic citizenship in the governance and lived experiences of commercial sex, and the changing nature of intimate citizenship regimes in Europe.