Military Camping: Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s Homosexualized Barracks in Pao Pao

Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s second novel, Pao Pao (1982), has often been considered as an example of hedonism and lack of structural criticism against the military institution. This study contradicts the vulgate by demonstrating its full readability through the lenses of queer theory via an explicit adoption of a camp point of view. Tondelli used camp as an aesthetics that also includes political intentionality, clearly visible in the novel’s proud—and yet amused—stance against the homophobic and heteronormative core of the army. Pao Pao’s camp, and its framing of military uniforms and plain clothes under the umbrella of just another (deeply queer) drag experiment, aim to the production of a new rainbow- queer-social-visibility-tesserae within and against the larger mosaic of a highly heteronormative society: the Italy of the Eighties