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Visual infrapolitics: gender performance in the Italian entertainment industry, between secret visuality and postfeminist resistance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2018

Francesca Martinez Tagliavia
Francesca Martinez Tagliavia*
Affiliation:
Centre de Recherches Historiques, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France
*
*Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article discusses postfeminist practices of resistance within contemporary visuality. Drawing on concepts used in visual and cultural studies, it describes and interprets the gender performance through which Giulia, a velina, challenges her own sexual and economic domination in her everyday affective labour and work. For this purpose, I report Giulia’s account of herself, resulting from a series of interviews conducted in 2014 and 2015. In the first part of the article, I will describe Giulia’s gendered etiquette, i.e. a complex of corporeal and behavioural prescriptions. Next, I will describe a set of acts of resistance performed by Giulia in her everyday social interactions in order to protect herself, to speak out and to build alliances against the violence implied by the stigma attached to the velina’s gender/class norm. Finally, I will apply the concept of visual infrapolitics to the open field of visual practices through which a female worker of the entertainment industry criticises the gender-based violence implied by her labour form and by the stigma attached to her gender etiquette. I argue that such a wide field of practices pertains to a postfeminist sensibility and materialises the possibility for collective acts of resistance.

Italian summary

Questo articolo discute di pratiche postfemministe di resistenza all’interno della visualità contemporanea. Utilizzando il punto di vista degli studi visuali, culturali e femministi sull’immagine e i media, si discute e interpreta la performance di genere attraverso la quale Giulia, una velina, ovvero una lavoratrice dell’industria italiana della televisione e dell’intrattenimento, affronta la propria dominazione sessuale ed economica nel suo lavoro affettivo quotidiano. A tal fine, riporterò il racconto di Giulia su di sé, grazie ad una serie di interviste che ho condotto insieme a lei a Milano, nel 2014 e nel 2015. Nella prima parte dell’articolo, descriverò l’etichetta di genere di Giulia come un complesso di prescrizioni corporali e comportamentali. Nella seconda parte dell’articolo, descriverò come postfemministi, una serie di atti che costituiscono la resistenza di Giulia, nel corso delle sue quotidiane interazioni sociali, per protestare, per proteggersi e per tessere alleanze, contro la violenza implicata dallo stigma dell’etichetta velina. Infine, nella terza parte dell’articolo, suggerirò di designare con l’espressione di infrapolitica visuale, il campo aperto delle pratiche che materializzano conflitti mascherati, resistenze invisibili e consensi spettacolari, attraverso i quali una lavoratrice dell’industria dell’intrattenimento critica ogni giorno la violenza di genere implicata dal tipo di lavoro che svolge e dallo stigma che pesa sulla propria etichetta. In conclusione, mostrerò l’importanza di osservare questo ampio campo di pratiche praticate dalle donne e ascrivibili ad una sensibilità postfemminista, perché in esso si dànno le condizioni di possibilità degli atti di resistanza collettivi.

Keywords

visualityinfrapoliticstelevisionpostfeminismgendersexuality
Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 23 , Special Issue 2: Special Issue: Sexuality and Power in Contemporary Italy: Subjectivities Between Gender Norms, Agency and Social Transformation , May 2018 , pp. 173 - 185
Copyright
© 2018 Association for the Study of Modern Italy 

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