Representations of Lethal Gender-Based Violence in Italy Between Journalism and Literature by Nicoletta Mandolini

Author:Nicoletta Mandolini [Mandolini, Nicoletta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000424898
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 57156061
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Feminist rewritings

This corpus of literary texts is the result of a selection among the publications on the topic of femicide that have reached Italian bookshops since 2012. After a careful consultation of the numerous volumes (novels or short-story collections) published after the mainstreaming of feminist discourse on lethal gender violence, two major tendencies have been identified. On the one hand, many Italian works on femicide can be labeled as rewritings of previous journalistic, historical, or mythical narratives. On the other hand, books belonging to the area of genre fiction (crime, horror, and science fiction) are a largely represented category when it comes to Italian texts on women’s sexist murders.1 Considering the ability of rewritings of (true and not true) stories of femicide to support a critical reflection on the issue of fictional and non-fictional portrayals of gender abuse that this volume aims at conducting, this category was selected for the analysis. Moreover, literary rewritings present a higher degree of proximity with journalistic narratives, which facilitates the comparative methodology that characterizes this book.

The idea of rewriting that serves as a unifying conceptual tool for the texts examined in this second part testifies to the propensity of the literary works to renegotiate and deconstruct narratives that were already rooted in individual and collective memory. This tendency can be referred to the need for implementing the criticism of mainstream and canonical narratives developed by the feminist metadiscourse on femicide and, as such, it can be compared to the counter-informative ethos that guides the journalistic inquiries discussed in the previous chapters. But literary rewriting is, as Liedeke Plate argued, first of all, a feminist practice through which women2 have been able to (re)appropriate stories and events with the objective of performing their memorial and at the same time transformative urgency (2010:7–8). In this sense, rewriting re-situates women within the mechanisms of cultural memory production and, consequently, it presents them as subjects whose agency is expressed by their capacity for contrasting patriarchal monologism (Plate 2010:5–6). As Adrienne Rich contended, “feminist re-vision” is nothing less than a survival strategy for the feminist subjectivity (1972:18).

In the Italian context, rewriting has been an essential practice for feminists who have been active within and beyond the literary sphere. The redrafting of journalistic chronicles on violence against women, for example, was a constitutive part of the cultural work that feminist activists undertook during the Seventies, when the aforementioned Circeo massacre occurred and sexual violence became a publicly debated political issue (Mandolini 2017:428–429). The critical re-narration of the journalistic coverage of rape cases produced in those years is testified, among other examples, by Maria Adele Teodori’s Le violentate (1977), a publication where the author rewrites two episodes of sexual violence from a feminist perspective (the Circeo massacre and a rape that occurred in Verona in 1976) as well as the trials and protests that followed.

It is again during the Seventies that the rewriting of historical events developed among feminists in Italy. The aim of reassigning protagonism to female historical figures obliterated

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