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- Volume 11, Issue 2, 2023
Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies - Gender Issues: Trajectories of Change in the Italian Mediascape, Mar 2023
Gender Issues: Trajectories of Change in the Italian Mediascape, Mar 2023
- Editorial
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Gender issues: Trajectories of change in the Italian mediascape
Authors: Milly Buonanno and Franca FaccioliBeyond single works scattered across different publication venues, Italian scholarship on gender and media has hardly circulated abroad. This Special Issue is, therefore, meant to make a substantial contribution to the international visibility and consideration of a body of works that has so far remained in the shadows. From this perspective, the varied range of the articles in the issue offers an overview of both the current status of gender and media studies in Italy and the ways gender is constructed in discourses, practices and actions throughout the Italian media landscape – including television, radio, fashion magazines, newspapers and digital platforms. In addition to the variety of media and topics, the works collected in this issue are also peculiar for resorting frequently to the historiographic approach, on the assumption that trajectories of change in gender and media relationship can only be traced in the comparison between past and present.
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- Articles
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Femmes fatales, saints, empowered women: Female biopics in Italian public television
More LessJoining the current scholarly dialogue between biopic studies and gender/feminist/media studies, this work is meant to retrace the evolution of gender politics as expressed in the biographical genre which has played the role of the mainstay of domestic television drama since the origin of Italian broadcasting. Through a historical perspective that aims to track continuity and change over time, this work places a major focus on the 2000s, during which time women’s biographies experienced considerable growth on Italian television and more importantly began to replace traditional figures of saints and femmes fatales with female professionals in positions of leadership (journalists, politicians, entrepreneurs, scientists and artists). Based on the examination of several biopics and the close analysis of the most watched recent biopic about an ‘empowered woman’ (Luisa Spagnoli [2016]), this article seeks to explore whether the new wave of female biopics breaks crystallized generic conventions and foregrounds new representational strategies influenced by feminism or post-feminism.
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Sexualized female confidence: A new gender display in over 50 years of Italian fashion advertisements
More LessThis article examines the evolution of female images in Vogue Italia’s fashion advertisements over more than five decades. The aims of the article were to reconstruct the evolution of female representations over time, to detect the persistence of gender displays in women’s portrayals and to ascertain the existence, in the 2000s, of the visual regime of confident appearing. To achieve these aims, a longitudinal quantitative and qualitative content analysis was carried out on 1963 ads and 2568 male and female models. The research found an evolution of women’s images over time, the decline of some traditional genderisms and a resexualization of the female portrayals in the 2000s, interlaced with the confident-appearing visual regime. What emerged was a new gender display – a sexualized confidence – that does not eliminate gender differences or their structure of power but concentrates them in portraits of assertive and narcissistic women.
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Women scientists in Italian media in times of coronavirus: Between low recognition and success as experts
More LessDuring the months of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Italian media helped provide an unprecedented degree of exposure for women scientists. The essay highlights the results of a quantitative and qualitative study on the portrayal and self-portrayal of Italian women scientists based on the digital editions of eight daily national newspapers and ten talk shows on the main national television channels from February to May 2020. The aim of the study is to show if and how those women scientists were valued as ‘experts’ or, alternatively, discredited professionally. The picture that emerges is ambivalent: on the one hand, most journalists of both sexes minimize the role of women scientists, and on the other hand, their ability to appear as authoritative in science as their male colleagues makes us optimistic about the role they can hypothetically play in convincing the new generation of Italian women to study STEM subjects.
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Gender in COVID-19 campaigns: An analysis of the Italian government communications
Authors: Franca Faccioli and Lucia D’AmbrosiThe gender studies approach of this contribution addresses the issue of communication in the Italian government’s response to COVID-19. In the past, the government had often focused its communication on the promotion of political activities, with stereotypical representations of men and women instead of a culture of communication based on the concept of ‘civil servant’ with a gender lens. This article ponders whether methods of disseminating information and representing the pandemic are driven by innovative models of communication that advocate for a gender-conscious approach. Using a qualitative analysis, this contribution examines the government’s communication campaigns during the pandemic and inquires if and how the narrative of the pandemic has impacted the representation of gender. We analyse public service advertisements on television and in the digital media. Our results show distinct features of and issues with mainstream and social media storytelling strategies.
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Stereotyped gender roles and scripts in digital dating abuse: Narratives from an Italian high school
More LessThis study analyses teenage narratives of digital dating abuse (DDA) by focusing on how the sense-giving processes of social media usage practices interplay with sexist stereotypes and gender scripts. The theoretical framework draws upon gender-oriented studies on DDA and upon literature on gender and technology, which accounts for the mutual shaping relationship between gender-based social norms, and user negotiations with social media affordances. We carried out seven focus groups in Rome with 43 high school students aged 14 to 16. Responses show that, although both girls and boys perpetrate and suffer DDA on social media, participants interpret it according to gender scripts and classify users based on sexist stereotypes. Findings also reveal that perception of the seriousness of DDA is blurred by the combination of gender scripts and the meanings attached to social media usage practices. DDA is likely to be tolerated unless it has concrete fallout offline, where abuse is tangible.
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Love affairs: The piccola posta in the age of social media
Authors: Giovanni Ciofalo, Silvia Leonzi and Grazia QuerciaThe piccola posta, which are reader’s letters to women’s magazines, represent a noteworthy phenomenon for the analysis of social, cultural and communicative practices particularly in relation to representation and self-representation, also in terms of gender. Through a brief reconstruction of its evolution, the piccola posta was identified as a space of interaction, exchange and hybrid sharing which managed to depict the contradiction between the stability of traditional morals based on nineteenth-century models and the increasing need to acquire a new awareness in the personal experience. This article focuses on the social, cultural and media role of piccola posta today, developing a qualitative and quantitative analysis of columns currently active online in, for example, traditional web newspapers, blogs and social media. The aim is to understand how the piccola posta of today could still be a worksite to process innovation about relations, self-perception and sexuality.
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Women in the Italian television industry: Tradition or innovation?
More LessStarting from the hypothesis that gender is embedded in the global contemporary society’s individual, interactional and institutional dimensions, this research proposes recognizing female employment and empowerment in major Italian audio-visual companies. A progressive increase in the representation of women in creative, productive and managerial positions within Italian television can create a greater understanding of the difficulties of being a working woman and provide the added value of a female presence in Italian audio-visual companies. In addition to official data, this article analyses the primary data of 30 in-depth interviews with TV producers, authors and managers of successful Italian television programmes. This methodology aims to trace a set of personal and professional career trajectories and their distinctive and innovative contributions to Italian audio-visual industries. My intention is to highlight which Italian production contexts are currently favourable to the empowerment of women workers in the television industry and outline future trends.
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Radio programming by and for women in Italy in the 1970s: The case of Noi, voi, loro donna
More LessThis article explores the medium of radio as a vehicle for female empowerment from a cultural-historical perspective. It focuses on programmes by and for women on Italian public radio in the 1970s, at the height of second-wave feminism. In keeping with a constructionist approach that enhances the innovative potential of media, and recognizing radio as a source for women’s history, the article aims to identify the ways and goals by which radio speaks about women and addresses women. Following a case study methodology that focuses on the programme Noi, voi, loro donna (‘We, you, they woman’) (1978–82, Radio Tre), the article highlights the radio’s commitment for women’s rights: it offered a space for women-led discussion on women’s issues; it spread knowledge, reflections and analyses about gender inequalities and feminism; and thereby it provided women with the cognitive tools to acquire self-awareness, become familiar with new ideas and behaviours and redefine their identities.
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- Conversations
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Women in media: ‘Planting and watering the seeds for change’: A conversation with Domizia De Rosa
More LessDomizia De Rosa joined the Warner Bros. group in 1995 and was promoted to executive director at Warner Bros. International Television Italia Srl. in 2014. The president of Women in Film, Television and Media Italy (WIFTMI) since 2021, De Rosa is committed to promoting gender equality in the Italian audio-visual and media sectors. In this interview, she talks about her career as a woman in a position of authority in the media industry and how she gradually rose through the ranks to become an executive director of the Warner Bros. Entertainment Italia group. She also explains the reasons for the asymmetrical presence of women in television, illustrates the goals of the Code of Ethical Conduct for the Audio-Visual Sector that was established in 2021 and discusses the value of ‘creative intimacy’ as the synthesis of personal experiences precious to building a community of creative professionals.
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Structure and agency in the career of a female pioneer in Italian journalism: A conversation with Anna Maria Mori
More LessThis conversation with Anna Maria Mori aims to reconstruct, through the testimony and the memories of a prominent pioneer of women’s journalism, the feminization of news making practices and cultures in Italy. From a twenty-first century perspective, the interview will retrace the evolution of women’s access to careers in Italian journalism, bringing to light the undeniable progress and the persistent areas of criticality, the asymmetries between the increasing presence and visibility gained by women journalists and their enduring underrepresentation when it comes to leadership positions in the newsroom. Having covered many different roles during her long career, which has developed through the daily press, women’s magazines, radio and television, Mori is the ideal interlocutor for the specific intent of this interview.
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- Report
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Italian cinema and media: Past and present, continuity and change, expectations for the future: Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies – Third International Conference, American University of Rome, 16–18 June 2022
By Glen BonniciIn 2022, the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies ( JICMS) marked its tenth anniversary and a return to its in-person international conference. The third edition was once again held at The American University of Rome on 16–18 June 2022. The directors, Flavia Laviosa and Catherine Ramsey-Portolano, welcomed 130 academics and researchers from eighteen countries who reflected the current trends and directions within the Italian screen industries and studies. The keynote speaker was Stephen Gundle, and the programme also included a screening of the film Un confine incerto (An Uncertain Border) (2019), directed and co-written by Isabella Sandri, and a virtual seminar on academic publishing delivered by Intellect.
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