Abstract
The radical theories of Italian thinker Mario Mieli are still unknown to Anglo-American audiences. Founder of the Italian homosexual movement, Mieli must be rediscovered for his theory and embodiment of transessualità, developed in Elements of a Gay Critique. This article explores transessualità as the product of “erotic communism,” the countersexual discourse of the 1970s, which enables transessualità, simultaneous discovery of the woman within every man and the release of polymorphous desires, suppressed by a culture of educastration. Building on the mobile desires of De Lauretis's lesbian subjectivity via rereadings of Freud, Laplanche and Pontalis, and Bersani and Dutoit, this article claims that transessualità is a “practice of love” and an intersubjective knowledge that involves two interrelated material and libidinal practices: staging the “woman within” and anal intercourse. A mimetic reading of Mieli's erotic communism (anus) and Irigary's female homoeconomy (lips) provides a theoretical model for reading trans-subjectivity and desire.