Indelible: Violence Against Women and Their Resistance to It in the Visual and Performing Arts in Italy and Beyond

Abstract

The visual and performing arts can be instrumental in exposing the complexity of the numerous forms violence against women and girls takes, and in exploring old and new forms of resistance. The articles in this special issue emerged from a three-year project of the Visual and Performance Studies Research Group funded by the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies (ACIS) to examine the representation of violence against women and their resistance to such violence in Italy and beyond and contribute to analysis and understanding of how gendered violence and resistance to it are represented in the arts. A key strand concerned the arts in contemporary Italy, but its scope was broad and encouraged comparison with other societies in order to share significant aspects of the Italian situation with a wider audience, highlight the global scale of the problem, and help identify opportunities for collective resistance. This scope is reflected in the four pieces here, which examine the possibilities that different forms of representation can offer either to reinforce or contest violence against women.

The visual and performing arts can be instrumental in exposing the complexity of the numerous forms violence against women and girls takes, and in exploring old and new forms of resistance. The articles in this special issue emerged from a 3-year project of the Visual and Performance Studies Research Group funded by the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies (ACIS) to examine the representation of violence against women and their resistance to such violence in Italy and beyond. The project aimed to contribute to analysis and understanding of how gendered violence and resistance to it are represented in the arts. ¹ A key strand concerned the arts in contemporary Italy, but its scope was broad and encouraged comparison with other societies in order to share significant aspects of the Italian situation with a wider audience, highlight the global scale of the problem, and help identify opportunities for collective resistance. This scope is reflected in the four pieces here, which examine the possibilities that different forms of representation can offer either to reinforce or contest violence against women. They move from a primary focus on how violence against women has been represented in Italy in the first two articles to a consideration that expands beyond Italy's borders in the final pair. ²

Italy is an important case study for a number of reasons. Sadly, one of these is its poor showing among Western nations in terms of gender equality. The European Institute for Gender Equality's (2021) Gender Equality Index report (which measures equality across work, money, knowledge, time, power, and health) shows Italy in 14th place, last among EU member states. Other markers of the status of women in Italy that have garnered international attention recently include the Lombardy health authority questionnaire distributed to recovering Covid patients, which directed questions about cooking and housework only to women respondents (see Giuffrida, 2021). While this may seem relatively trivial, scholars and activists have noted the continuum of oppression that extends from this day-to-day sexism to the terrible figures for femicide in Italy, with the latest Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT, 2022) figures showing that although two out of five murders are of women, in 2021 58.8% of murders of women in Italy are committed by their spouse or partner, compared to 2.9% of murders of men (the percentages of women murdered by a spouse or partner were 57.8% in 2020 and 61.3% in 2019). While murders overall have declined since 1992, with murders of men decreasing from 4/100,000 men to 0.7/100,000 in 2018, the number of women murdered has remained relatively stable, changing from 0.6/100,000 to 0.4/100,000 women in the same period. The ISTAT (2019) survey of attitudes toward sexual violence showed that 39.3% of the Italian population believed that women who do not want to have sex can always avoid it, 23.9% believed that women can provoke sexual violence through what they choose to wear, 15.1% believed that women who experience sexual violence while under the influence of alcohol or drugs are partly responsible, and 10.3% believed that accusations of sexual violence are often false.

Recent scholarship also provides important context for understanding the issue of violence against women in Italy and the ongoing problem of how it is perceived. For example, Giovanna Parmigiani's (2019, p. 2) ethnographic study of the “legitimization of the emergency of feminicidio [femicide] within Italian public opinion” provides insights into what she calls “a new women's question in Italy around violence against women” over the past 15 years, while Daniela Bandelli's (2017) work has questioned the gender framework that shapes both the perception and reality of violence against women. Marina Bettaglio, Nicoletta Mandolini, and Silvia Ross's (2018) edited volume on the representation of violence against women in Italian criticism, activism, writing, and media picks up on this theme through an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing the cultural archetypes that shape the discourse around gender violence. They open their book by highlighting the “non in mio nome” (not in my name) mass protests of 2007 against racist and sexist media coverage and the right-wing politicization of the rape and murder of Giovanna Reggiani in Rome, identifying the protests as a watershed moment for a new prominence in Italian public life of this discourse. While noting the limitations of a protest movement that failed to embrace its potential for deeper intersectional engagement with questions of racial, class-based, and other inequalities, they underscore its importance for spreading a greater level of public understanding that the issue of violence against women is not simply about ensuring its visibility but also that it is understood specifically as gender-based violence, and that the connections are drawn between physical harm and the harms caused by discriminatory, derogatory, and objectifying representations of women. Fatima Farina, Bruna Mura, and Raffaella Sarti (2020, p. 11) note the need for a holistic understanding of the workings of gender-based violence; one that does not just observe the “tip of the iceberg” of the “most brutal manifestations of violence” but instead seeks to understand “the terrain in which its network of roots is buried” in order to “make possible effective acts of prevention and opposition.” While many of these works focus on literal violence and its devastating impacts, they also point to the significance of the symbolic violence constituted by sexist and oppressive representations of women, and of the patriarchal power structures that continue to reinforce their messages.

The four articles published here engage with this body of work and reflect a similarly wide range of approaches and locations. Sarah Patricia Hill's article examines the ways in which women diagnosed or labeled with mental health disorders have been represented in photography and on screen in Italy since the late 19th century and up to the present day. It analyzes the relationship between such representations and the structural, gendered violence perpetrated against these women, particularly through the system of manicomi or psychiatric asylums eventually dismantled through the 1978 Law 180. It notes that from the 19th century onward, photographic and cinematographic representations of women with mental disorder diagnoses are most often framed and marked by forms of violence. Hill argues that such images need to be viewed in the context of the shared status of photography and psychiatry as contemporarily “modern” inventions with interconnected scopic regimes that play an important role in either reinforcing or contesting violent systems of surveillance and oppression of women. Before moving on to consider the impacts of the social upheavals and the radical psychiatry movement of the 1960s and beyond, she therefore focuses in particular on the convergence of these notions of modernity prior to and under the fascist regime, in order to shed light on the ongoing impact of pre-fascist and fascist visual representations on the collective imaginary of female “madness” and their role in perpetuating structures and attitudes that contribute to violence against women.

Bernadette Luciano's article points out that just as numerous films and docudramas dealing with domestic violence have proliferated on international screens over recent decades, so too have scholarly works increasingly considered how images and narratives of violence reflect social dynamics of power and subordination. The article considers how fictional representations of domestic violence address issues of domestic violence and attempt to create a space for reflection and change. Luciano shows how contemporary Italian films have moved away from “normalized” and comedic representations of domestic violence in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s to more politically engaged films that foreground instead the tragedy and horror of abuse that remains deeply rooted in long-term acceptance of such behavior. Ferzan Ozpetek's 2008 Un giorno perfetto (A Perfect Day), Andrès Arce Maldonado's 2017 Dentro (Inside), and Ivano de Matteo's 2016 La vita possibile (A Possible Life) provide different perspectives on domestic violence and expose the pervasive and transversal nature of such violence, which cuts across age, ethnicity, and class. Luciano shows how the filmmakers ultimately challenge the conception of domestic violence as a fixed and an unchangeable condition for women through the unfolding of the three stories. She argues that the protagonists who make the risky and dangerous choice of leaving these spaces are mobilized by the empowerment brought about by female solidarity, empathy, and care that serve as pathways to combatting the isolation, guilt, and associated emotions that prevent women from seeking or finding “la vita possible.”

Daniela Cavallaro's piece analyzes several plays by European playwrights that focus on cases of female genital mutilation (FGM): “Kubra” by Italian playwright Dacia Maraini (2016); Little Stitches by UK-based writers Bahar Brunton, Karis Halsall, Isley Lynn, and Raúl Quirós Molina (2014); and Cuttin’ It by British playwright Charlene James (2016). These plays share the goal of raising awareness among the playwrights’ communities of the practice of genital mutilation, the reason it exists or persists, and the consequences it has had on the lives of the women who have undergone it. Cavallaro notes that the plays share a reliance on personal narratives of lived experiences of FGM, and that all the playwrights carried out extensive research and interviews with survivors in order to try to get the best possible understanding of a practice that is not part of their own cultural contexts. They note the risks of being seen to “preach” to communities not their own, but Cavallaro argues that their goal “was to make the voices of the survivors heard and validated, and impart knowledge, sympathy, and a desire for action among people who had very little knowledge of the practice and may have not realized how close to home it was.” She shows how, by focusing on the voices and agency of the women of those communities, these playwrights seek an ethical means of raising awareness of the issue and advocating for the universal civil and human rights of women all over the world.

Moving from the literal theater to the figurative theater of the border, the final article by Marinella Marmo, “Unmasking state harm: the border as a theatrical space of gendered violence,” analyzes systematic violence against women at borders around the world as a deliberate “staging” of otherness designed to reassert internal security. Addressing the question of systemic state violence on women traveling with legal documents at an external border, Marmo argues for the need for much greater attention to the numerous records of internal, invasive, degrading, and superfluous examinations at several western borders (e.g., those of the European Union and those at the United States’ southern and northern borders) that embody alarming institutional violence against women. Through these abusive and demeaning incidents ranging from internal examinations to forced strip searches and other abusive forms of interrogation, the border is used to assert power over the female traveler with legal documentation, even when holding citizenship, and to impose “exclusion” and “sovereignty” through humiliating practices. The search for the “truth” via the body is deemed necessary by the immigration officer, because the woman's oral testimony of her intention regarding entry and her production of legal paperwork cannot be “trusted.” At the border each individual plays a role—willingly or not—in the “theatre of liminality” (Turner, 1979), where “otherness” is defined by sovereignty, patriarchy and post-colonialism. Marmo's article interprets these violent encounters as a theatrical performance of repeated gestures, an artistic exhibition of postcolonial and patriarchal power, and argues that reading them through the lens of “representation” allows us to unmask its violence. She argues that for the state, the border has become a theatrical space in which to send a “message of security” to its constituencies, but one that depends on the fundamental insecurity of the women it victimizes.

The editors would like to thank ACIS for the generous support that has made possible the many activities of this research project on the theme of representations of violence against women and their resistance to violence, including support for the work of early career researchers and those without institutional affiliations or permanent academic roles. This has been especially important during the global pandemic, which has only heightened the precarity that many researchers face.