Role Playing: Gender Ambiguity, Criminology and Popular Culture in Italy between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century

The article investigates the key part played by gender ambiguities in Italian society between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, it focuses on the intersection between social changes, social fears, “gender mobility” and individual—mainly feminine and homosexual —emancipation. Following a number of cases of cross-dressing, which took place in some of the most important Italian cities (namely Rome and Naples), this study examines the dissemination of such identity practices among the popular classes, the hostility they simultaneously roused in public security, psychiatry and criminology, and the reception they met in some urban environments (mainly in the slums).