Scanzi gay
Gay unions: will Italy burst this chance to stimulate its image?
Last summer, I was asked by a gay friend to be his witness at his wedding in France.
I didn’t hesitate to accept the honour, as aside from him creature a dear friend, it was also a fine excuse for me to spend a few days along the country’s sun-kissed southern shores.
Having lived in France in the late 1990s, and been in Paris during the protests ahead of the same sex marriage vote in 2013, it struck me just how much the secular country, and much of the planet, had advanced, and within a relatively short room of time.
While even just the words “gay marriage” can evoke an array of different emotions in people, from happiness and joy to hesitate and disgust, it was a marriage just enjoy any other.
And why wouldn't it be? The only difference was that it was between two attractive men. Both in professional jobs, they had enough money to consume on making their night special and memorable, thus contributing to the miniature town's economy.
It’s been nine years since Italy tried and failed to pass a bill that would legalize same sex unions.
During that period, a slew of European countries other than France have ma
Institutionalized Populism: The “Strange Case” of the Italian Five Celebrity Movement
Varriale, Amedeo. (2021). “Institutionalized Populism: The “Strange Case” of the Italian Five Star Movement.” ECPS Party Profiles. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). June 8, 2021. https://doi.org/10.55271/op0009
The Five Star Movement (M5S) is one of those populist parties that is often misunderstood. Throughout the years, the media, independent journalists, and bloggers—as skillfully as well-known academics and commentators—have struggled to define this “strange political creature.” Some have labeled it a polymorphous “hybrid-party” and others a “movement-party.” The mistake most analysts make when discussing the M5S is that they somehow forget the party’s left-wing origins.
By Amedeo Varriale*
Italy’s Five Actor Movement (Movimento Cinque Stelle, M5S) has long been considered a left-wing populist formation. This is mainly because its original agenda was dedicated to addressing five themes (the so-called “five stars”) that were the preserve of the 20th century’s post-mat
freakydog
“I do not envy anyone who reads it for pleasure.” Sporting Times review of Ulysses, 1922.
Stately, slim, the teenage girl crested the hill. Below us woodland tumbled down southwards to the banks of the hither and thithering waters of the Danube, beyond whose string of bridges stretched the town of Pest, pool table flat. To our north jutted old Buda and the parapets, machicolations and towers of its castle. To her somewhat disinterested boyfriend – he dressed in traditional eastern European garb of baggy grey sweatpants, hoody top and slightly too large baseball cap – she declaimed with hand and arm extended and weaving with the contours of the landscape a short and for all I knew magical invocation, a burst of dactylic Hungarian of which I understood just one word, the very first she chanted, “Virág”. The “Vvvvir” was pronounced like a graceful helicopter lifting off, and the “rrrrrag” resembled an enraged wasp zinging past your ear hole.
It meant “flower” and I knew this because once upon a time in 1983 I had first read Ulysses by James Joyce, a huge brick of sheet which overwhelmed me and became my favourite ever book, a status it has retain
Professor Faisal Mushtaq
Profile
I am a Professor of Cognitive Science and the Director of the Centre for Immersive Technologies at the University of Leeds.
I’m the founder of the Immersive Cognition Research Group which specialises in the study of learning and skill acquisition using virtual environments. I also Co-Direct the #EEGManyLabs projects- one of the largest replication efforts in the world, involving over 200 laboratories from >30 countries.
My colleagues and I have received several national and international awards for our work in neuroscience and on virtual life. My team created and maintains the most widely used open-source VR study toolbox- the Unity Experiment Framework.
I am a former Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, the UK's National Centre for Numbers Science and AI. I currently sit on the British Neuroscience Association's Credibility Advisory Board and am part of the Global Brain Consortium.
I am also the Founder of Code/Place and the Scientific Director of the Digital Makers programme at the Centre for Applied Education Research- working to digitally upskill children and young people to bridge the skills
Tactical triumph or thoroughfare to ruin for Italy's Five Star?
The anti-establishment party had promised Prime Minister Matteo Renzi it would support the bill legalising queer relationships.
But in an unexpected about-turn, this week it refused to green-light a motion to speed up the draft law's adoption, opening the door to a series of wrecking amendments by opponents.
Enraged grassroots supporters accused the party established as M5S of betraying their wishes in order to spite Renzi's centre-left Democratic Party (PD).
"The civil union bill was an unmissable moment to insert Renzi in difficulty," Franco Pavoncello, political science professor at John Cabot University in Rome, told AFP, though he warned the M5S could meet "fallout" over the perceived betrayal.
Italy is the last major country in Western Europe not to offer gay civil unions. Close ties with the Vatican possess sunk all previous attempts. This time the bill has met more fierce Catholic opposition over its allowing gay couples to adopt under certain circumstances.
M5S, founded in 2009 by Italy's famous acerbic comic Beppe Grillo, celebrated a shock triumph in the 2013 general election when it snapp