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{
    "pk": 40598,
    "title": "Postfeminist (Dis)Entanglements: Transgression and Conformism in Contemporary Italian Teen Movies",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "According to film historian Giampiero Brunetta, the success of Luca Lucini’s \nTre metri sopra il cielo\n (Three Steps Over Heaven, 2004) and Fabio Brizzi’s \nNotte prima degli esami\n (Night Before the Exams, 2006) is emblematic of the current “crisis” of Italian cinema. The premise of Brunetta’s negative comments are primarily aesthetics (bad script, bad direction), while other reviewers have blamed the same films for unrealistic portrayals of Italian teenagers, and expressed their concerns about the moral and social influence that such mis-representations might have on the young spectators. My essay begins from these negative accounts to suggest an alternative reading of contemporary Italian teen movies, by which I mean popular fictions that both represent teenagers and\n \nmarket teenage audiences. These movies constitute a “filone” (cycle) on the basis of similarities in plots and characters, narratives formulas, choice of actors and actresses, and commercial strategies. At the core of the successful cycle of teen films, I argue, there are the tropes of freedom and choice, and the concepts of agency and individualization. These ideas are fundamental to the construction of the neo-liberal subject, rather than some deviant example of social and moral behaviors, and thus worth of our attention. Furthermore, sexuality and the sexualization of both the male and the female bodies are central discourses to the film narratives and visual strategies, which inform a configuration of gender/sex system whose features have been widely discussed by scholars in British and American cultural and film studies, under the label of “postfeminism.” In this essay, films such as Federico Moccia’s \nAmore 14\n (2009) will be taken as examples to suggest a taxonomy of postfeminist female characters, in their various declinations. I will contextualize contemporary Italian productions in relation to critical texts on postfeminism such as Angela McRobbie’s \nThe Aftermath of Feminism, \nand studies on female-oriented cycles such as Hilary Radner on American girly films.\n \nMy intention is to shed light on both the specificities of the Italian context and the continuities across national borders, in a globalized and transnational film industry.",
    "language": "en",
    "license": {
        "name": "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial  4.0",
        "short_name": "CC BY-NC 4.0",
        "text": "Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\n\nNonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.\n\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.",
        "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0"
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "popular cinema"
        },
        {
            "word": "postfeminism"
        },
        {
            "word": "Italian teen movies"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Vol. 6: Italy and Images",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1sx4h2mb",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Paola",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Bonifazio",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "The University of Texas at Austin",
            "department": "None"
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": "2015-06-05T18:42:22Z",
    "date_accepted": "2015-06-05T18:42:22Z",
    "date_published": "2016-12-15T18:35:33Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cisj/article/40598/galley/30480/download/"
        }
    ]
}