| Abstract | Abstract Gender is a useful category for historical analysis of the project of Italian fascist nation-building, how it proceeded and how it became trapped in its own paradox. Fascist policies played upon normative and limited gender stereotypes of women as mothers and prolific bearers of children, yet in the process the dictatorship constructed women as political subjects for the first time in the history of the Italian nation. This paper focuses on the fascists’ demographics campaign - Il Duce's politics of proliferation—and investigates the possibility of subjectivity as a site for political struggle and resistance. Practices such as coitus interruptus and abortion, it is suggested, conformed to one hegemonic process while they defied another.
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