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Introduction to Issue: Real Women and Imagined Femininity: Images of Womanhood in Modern Italy

2023; American Association of Teachers of Italian; Volume: 100; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/23256672.100.3.02

2325-6672

Sara Delmedico, Manuela Franco,

Fashion and Cultural Textiles

The female image has been under scrutiny in Italy since the Middle Ages. Women were subjected to strict rules that suggested a model of femininity characterized by a modest appearance and behavior.1 Alongside lawmakers, theorists and moralists intervened to regulate women's appearance. Treatises scrutinizing women's bodies, behaviors and education were written with the aim of standardizing women's image and ruled on their makeup, their apparel, and their behavior and strongly intruded in their intimate lives.2From the eighteenth century, women began to be entrusted with educational tasks; their role started to change, with images of womanhood also evolving. Although still a product of male imagination and an "expression of the representation of the social order" (Covato), women started to carve a space beyond the private sphere and some of them joined the patriotic fight of the Risorgimento, even dressing as men to become soldiers (Sanson and Lucioli).In the first half of the twentieth century, the model of femininity radically changed, with the ideal woman embracing the androgynous look of the American flapper first and then the curvy fascist woman who embodied motherhood (De Grazia; Gori). After the Second World War, women began to obtain equal rights, gaining the right to vote and joining the workforce in roles previously considered only for men. At the same time, however, their image started to undergo a process of hyper-sexualization. In 1950s Italy, the term maggiorata (buxom beauty) was created in relation to curvy actresses like Gina Lollobrigida, Lucia Bosé, Silvana Mangano, and others, who conquered the screens and rose to fame due to their physical prominence. This phenomenon continued throughout the twentieth century and is still happening today; even as standards of beauty change according to the latest trends, the female body remains objectified. In the 1990s, for example, TV shows like Non è la RAI and the increasing popularity of showgirls whose presence was merely decorative influenced generations of women who kept seeing their bodies through the male gaze. From "maggiorate" to "heroin chic," the standard of beauty for women circulated through popular media, changing and influencing the perception and desires of Italian women.Nowadays, the use, abuse, and objectification of the female body and its image in the media continuously leverages the ambiguous and equivocal links between womanhood and beauty. If social media have increased the objectification of the female body and led many women of all ages to project a stereotyped image of themselves, those same platforms have given voices to women and female-led movements encouraging body positivity and challenging standards of beauty as well as the importance of appearance in women's lives (Caldeira et al.). But how did Italian women go from the "angel of the hearth" to "#bodypositivity"? How did different media reinforce or challenge established gender norms and beauty models? Such questions will be answered in this issue through analyses of a wide range of sources, from musical allegories in the Risorgimento, to the emerging mass media in the early twentieth century, and to the social media of the twenty-first century. Each article sheds light on different representations of womanhood, covering such issues as the role of the male gaze and women's interiorization of the gaze of others in shaping the ideal model of femininity and how women have challenged established categories to build their own image of the self. What emerges is a new perspective on Italian women's history that challenges the patriarchal view of an "imagined woman" and juxtaposes it to the reality of Italian women's experiences. By exploring how images and models of beauty changed over time in modern Italy, this issue focuses on widespread narratives around femininity and investigates the links between reality and stereotypes, between real women and imagined womanhood.With the increasing exposure of the female body in popular media, visual studies has become another crucial field for analyzing women's history. This issue aims to combine gender and visual studies to provide a thorough analysis of how the (self-)representation of womanhood evolved from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. It does so by proposing a series of analyses of different challenges that modern Italian women have had to face from the nineteenth century to the present day. The issue explores the reception and perception of womanhood through studies addressing laws, novels, popular print media, and theater to show the complexity of the image of femininity as stereotyped by the establishment and as perceived by women themselves.In "'Mendacia, deliria, scurrilitates erat sperandum.' Realtà e aspettative di una donna di fronte ai tribunali dello Stato Pontificio dell'Ottocento," Sara Delmedico proposes a case study, in which a woman, Umbellina Livi, starts a dispute against her family before Papal courts in order to obtain a larger dowry. Beyond the mere legal issue, this case shows the changing image of nineteenth-century women, who did not passively accept their status, challenging instead their families, their society, and their worlds. Héloïse Faucherre-Buresi's article "La donna che vogliono tutti? Figure contrastanti della patria in musica all'epoca del Risorgimento" addresses the image of women in the Risorgimento. By analyzing Verdi's Les vêpres siciliennes and a Sicilian song, "Oh chi m'abbinni lària," this work shows the use of the female image to personify the motherland and how this representation contributed to the construction of the nation's identity, with all its potential, submissive and subversive at the same time.Alessio Aletta frames the study of women's experience in literary spatial studies and mobility studies through the analysis of Pirandello's novels. His "She does not go. Immaginazioni geografiche al femminile in Pirandello," explores how the description of the space is conditioned by the gender of the characters in the novel, offering a perspective on women as characters and active subjects that impact the modernist writer's style. The study of the representation of Italian women's experiences in male-authored fiction is also explored by Marco Ceravolo in "'Io sono l'inferno, io sono la donna': riflessioni ecofemministe su Il grande ritratto di Dino Buzzati," a study of Buzzati's novel Il grande ritratto that is here approached within an ecofemminist framework. Ceravolo shows how the predominant patriarchal culture is an underlying issue that impacts femininity in fiction and that sometimes is expressed through narrative and linguistic choices.Lucia Aiello's "Sanctioned by Law: Post-Patriarchal Narratives of Gender-Based Violence" examines how narrative strategies of Anna Banti's Artemisia (1947), Elsa Morante's La Storia (1974), and Elena Ferrante's Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta (2013) challenged the patriarchal discourse on female subjectivity. She examines how these works have been both symptoms and instigators of the deep crisis of the patriarchal system, thus allowing the emergence of a post-patriarchal notion of the human. Female subjectivity is also explored by Virginia Niri in "'Puoi stare perfettamente tranquilla.' Dubbi, timori e autorappresentazioni del corpo femminile nelle rubriche di "Posta del cuore" (Italia, anni Sessanta e Settanta)." Niri approaches women's worries and self-representation of their bodies through the analysis of popular correspondence columns in 1960s and 1970s popular women's magazines. The so-called posta del cuore, agony aunt's columns, offer a rich corpus to study women's perception of their bodies and the internalized expectations that led many young women to seek advice during an historical phase of social changes. Niri offers an interpretation of these columns as a mirror to women's questioning of established models of femininity and gender roles in society. This analysis is followed by Anna Di Giusto's study of how comics in the 1970s incorporated the political activism of the Italian feminist movement.Focusing on feminist magazines like Effe and Strix, in "La risignificazione politica del corpo della donna nel fumetto femminista dell'Italia degli anni Settanta" Di Giusto shows how comics were used to deconstruct gender stereotypes and discuss such topics as abortion and divorce in an attempt to reach a wide audience. Magazines represented one of the most prominent means of distributing feminist content and had an impact on many aspects of women's lives, including their role as consumers. This aspect is explored by Silvia Pizzirani, who addresses women's consumption in the 1970s in her article "Natural Born Shoppers: Women, Consumption, and Politics in Italy during the 1970s." The focus on that specific decade helps deconstruct the image of women consumers and deepen our understanding on how Italian women changed their role in Italian society following Italy's economic miracle. Women emerge in all their human aspects, from their worries about the perception of their bodies to their active challenging of established gender norms and roles in society. To conclude this issue, Juliet Guzzetta explores the work of Giuliana Musso in "Epistemologie incarnate: La drammaturgia somatica di Giuliana Musso in Mio eroe." This last article poses an important question: what can personal and individual experience tell us about our society? Guzzetta takes Musso's attention to women's experiences as mothers of fallen soldiers to address the impact of political discourse and detachment on the life of the individual. Guzzetta reflects on how theater as a medium can create a collective response and provide a holistic interpretation of the war and our physical response to the emotions it provokes.This special issue provides a glimpse of the perception of women's experience as expected and established by the predominant gender norms from both the female and male perspective, providing testimony of both perceptions of womanhood across time, space, and media. Taken together, the nine articles in this issue offer a broad perspective on Italian women's experiences as active subjects in Italian society, rethinking the role of women and their reception of gender stereotypes and perception of themselves.