Sara Delmedico
University of Bologna
Through an interdisciplinary approach, this paper analyses women’s condition in post-World War II Italy and highlights how the end of war and return to peace was a contradictory and profoundly ambivalent process. Luigi Zampa’s movie L’onorevole Angelina (1947) is used as a case study to demonstrate how women’s inclusion in active citizenship, achieved with the right to vote in 1945, was not an endpoint but one stage of a long negotiation that exposed them to new forms of coercion and vulnerability. The representation of women and the post-war context in Zampa’s movie highlights a highly asymmetrical reality, imbued with stereotypical images and narratives, in which prejudice and violence, both tangible and intangible, are part of a process of female appropriation that did not end with the end of the war.
I will employ a feminist methodological lens that situates the movie in its social and cultural context, assessing how gender inequality was upheld by other forms of power such as sexuality, expectations, conformity. This will also enable me to explore the ways patriarchal systems have been constructed and sustained through cultural, legal and political frameworks and how implicit meanings and messages conveyed by images contributed to shape, produce and reproduce values, norms, hierarchies and power dynamics. The iconographic and iconological analyses on L’onorevole Angelina will help identify recurring themes and motifs that reflected the spirit of a time, when not every citizen was liberated in the same way.
Sara Delmedico (PhD, University of Cambridge) is Adjunct Professor at the University of Bologna, Italy. Her interests cover women’s history with a particular focus on the law and the Italian peninsula. She also works on the press and on the visual representation of women and femininity.