The discourse of sodom in a seventeenth-century Venetian text.

This essay examines L'Alcibiade fanciullo a scola, a seventeenth-century text written in Venice. L'Alcibiade is a sort of Platonic dialogue between a sodomite teacher and his young and attractive pupil. The teacher tries to convince his student to let him penetrate him. The discourse of the sodomite teacher is similar to Lacan's "discourse of the master." Maggi brings to the fore the intrinsic ambiguities of the sodomite discourse. On the one hand, since he posits himself outside society, the sodomite is able to manipulate and distort any sort of discourse. The sodomite teacher believes that women embody the religious/political power that oppresses sodomites. The master knows that any discourse exclusively aims to acquire a certain power. On the other hand, the sodomite discourse is nothing but another form of power/oppression. The master subjugates the other through his "sodomite rhetoric," based on lies and puns.