"Closet and Confessional: Television and Hybridity in Mambo Italiano" (original) (raw)
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Not My Queer: Queer Representation in Contemporary Italian Serial Television
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Since its inception in the mid-1950s, Italian domestic TV broadcasting and storytelling has established a close dialogue with national culture, identity and heritage. It would however be impossible to comprehensively account for the history and the peculiarities of Italian TV drama without bringing into the picture the 'transnational factor'. Television storytelling in Italy has developed within a porous cultural space open to the influence of foreign art forms and creative media productions. National and non-national or transnational elements have met, co-existed and interacted frequently, albeit differently, within the television environment, helping to shape, maintain or modify the 'Italian-ness' of home-grown television fiction. This holds particularly true for narrative serialization -long considered a lowbrow form of popular storytelling to be resisted and rejected. Based on these premises, the paper aims to address the influence of the 'transnational factor' on key moments -and key narratives (La piovra, 1980s; Un posto al sole, 1990s; Gomorra: la serie, 2000s) -along the difficult road to serialization traveled by Italian TV drama.
European Cinema and Television. Cultural Policy and Everyday Life
We have witnessed over the years the pluralization of co-existing and overlapping televisual spaces, on a global, trans-national, regional and local scale , but this re-configuration has not undermined the conception and reality of televisual space as being pre-eminently (even if not exclusively) national. Accordingly, the paraphrase of one of Mark Twain's famous quips -rumors of the death of the nation have been greatly exaggerated -has echoed in many authoritative statements in support of the lasting importance and even the central position of the nation for today's media world and hence for television studies (Curran
Hixstory Repeating? Italian Trans Televisibility through Realism, Family, Catholicism and Violence
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Trans* subjects in Italy have historically been invisibilised, misrepresented and mistreated in society and the media. Despite global advancements and the important achievements of Italian trans* activists, the situation of many trans* individuals in Italy remains precarious and threatened by cis-heteronormative violence and traditional and religious family values, often mirrored in the media. To date, the representation of trans people and issues on Italian television remains a contentious, under-researched and often overlooked area. In this chapter, after presenting and discussing the history and achievements of Italian trans* activism, how trans* subjects and issues have been represented through language, film and television in Italy is analysed. Subsequently, the author scrutinises more recent TV productions available: a very small number of portrayals of Italian trans* people in scripted television dramas, comedies and soap operas which are anchored to problematic discourses of trans* invisibility, the family, Catholicism and brutal violence in southern Italy. On thematic and distribution levels, these portrayals retrace trajectories already seen in the past and they reflect, with realism, the transphobia and trans-misogyny perpetuated in the country. These instances reveal some timid advancements in, and room for criticism and significant improvement of, trans* media visibility in contemporary Italy.
Midwest Modern Language Association, Chicago, Illinois, 5 November 2010.
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Country cousins: Europeanness, sexuality and locality in contemporary Italian television
Modern Italy, 2012
This article examines the consequences of the concurrence of a recent surge of interest in LGBT lives in the Italian media with the perceived transformation of Spain. Long considered Italy's close – though inferior – cultural cousin, Spain has been seen to be forging its own path with the reforms of the Zapatero administration, gay marriage especially. The article focuses onIl padre delle spose(RAIl, 2006), which generated intense discussion across the political spectrum precisely during the period in which the issue of recognising domestic partnerships between same-sex couples was being contested in Italy. The drama and surrounding media debates are analysed in order to articulate both the anxieties and the sense of opportunity brought about by Spain's ‘sorpasso’ of Italy. The drama is also informative for the way it reverses the standard ‘metropolitan’ trajectory of LGBT narrative. By relocating its lesbian protagonists to rural Puglia, the drama indicates how local tradit...