Duce/Divo

Abstract

This article compares the politics and masculinity of two Italian men—political leader Benito Mussolini and immigrant film star Rodolfo Valentino—who in the early 1920s arguably became the first important media “stars” for New York’s growing Italian American population. Rather than mere icons of a predetermined and “given” Italianness, the two men’s simultaneous popularity, representing such differing political beliefs and embodying such starkly different masculine ideals, points to the complexity of the “Americanization” of urban Italian Americans in the 1920s. Mussolini’s new, heroic manhood offered immigrants an opportunity to celebrate stereotypically male and American values in a self-consciously Italian form. Despite the totalitarianism and racism of the Fascist regime, the Duce’s iconic modernity contributed to his depoliticization. Likewise, Valentino’s exotic, sophisticated, and explicitly vulnerable masculinity participated in the restructuring of gender relationships in the United States. American and Italian American commentators were apparently more nervous about the gender-bending and apolitical yet also vaguely anti-Fascist divo than they were about the Fascist dictator.