Abstract
Media representations play a determining role in the process of forming and transforming collective perceptions of social phenomena. News media, in particular, are powerful political and social players, because while they ostensibly serve to inform the public about events of importance, they exert considerable influence in determining which events are deemed worthy of public attention and how those events are perceived. Such influence is not impartial, as Rosalind Gill has recently argued: “News is a cultural product that reflects the dominant cultural assumptions about who and what is important, determined by race, gender, class, wealth, power and nationality, and about what social relations and arrangements are deemed normal, natural and inevitable.”1 The validity of Gill’s statement is amplified in the context of 1970s Italy, where the majority of the country’s daily newspapers—the prime source of news for most Italians—were not only loosely associated with the ruling classes but actually owned by its major industrial groups and political parties.2
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Notes
Rosalind Gill, Gender and Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 113–14.
Matthew Hibberd, The Media in Italy: Press, Cinema and Broadcasting from Unification to Digital (Maidenhead: McGraw Hill / Open University Press, 2008);
Paolo Murialdi, Storia del giornalismo italiano (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000).
Gianni Losito, “La violenza politica nella stampa quotidiana italiana: Principali risultati di una ricerca dell’analisi del contenuto,” in Violenza sociale e violenza politica nell’Italia degli anni ’70, ed. by Gianni Statera (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1983), 107–54 (115).
Milly Buonanno, La donna nella stampa (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1978), 109.
Tuchman, Gaye, “Introduction: The Symbolic Annihilation of Women in the Mass Media,” in Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media, ed. by Gaye Tuchman, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, and James Benét (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 3–38.
Elisa Manni, “La donna nella televisione italiana,” in Women and Media in Europe, ed. by Fondazione Adkins Chiti and Donne in Musica della Fondazione CENSIS (Rome: Colombo, 2006), 27–59.
Elaine Rapping, “The Movie of the Week: Law, Narrativity and Gender in Prime Time,” in Feminism, Media and the Law, ed. by Martha A. Fineman and Martha T. McCluskey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 91–103.
Brigitte Nacos, Mass—mediated Terrorism: The Central Role of the Media in Terrorism and Counter—Terrorism (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 220.
Pippa Norris, Women, Media and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 6.
Ida Faré and Franca Spirito, Mara e le altre. Le donne e la lotta armata: storie, interviste, riflessioni (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979);
Anna Teresa Iaccheo, Donne armate. Resistenza e terrorismo: Testimoni dalla storia (Milan: Mursia, 1986);
D. Ronci, “L’immagine della donna terrorista nella informazione,” in Diritto e rovescio: Studi sulle donne e il controllo sociale, ed. by Tamar Pitch (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1987), 275–95;
Paola di Di Cori, “Partigiane, repubblichine, terroriste: Le donne armate come problema storiografico,” in Guerre fratricide: Le guerre civili in età contemporanea, ed. by Gabriele Ranzato (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1994), 304–29.
Elizabeth A. Wheeler, Uncontained: Urban Fiction in Postwar America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001).
The concept of the capsule is similar to that of the traumatic kernel advanced in Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, i (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Hilary Neroni, The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema (Albany: SUNY University Press, 2005), 25.
Stefania Podda, Nome di battaglia Mara: Vita e morte di Margherita Cagol, il primo capo delle Br (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 2007), 3.
In addition to the work of Podda and Faré and Spirito, other factual reconstructions of Cagol’s story include Piero Agostino, Mara Cagol: Una donna nelle prime Brigate Rosse (Venice: Marsilio, 1980);
Alberto Franceschini, Pier Vittorio Buffa, and Franco Giustolisi, Mara, Renato e io: Storia dei fondatori delle BR (Milan: Mondadori, 1988).
In the realms of cultural production, Cagol’s story resurfaces in a novel by Nanni Balestrini, La violenza illustrata (Turin: Einaudi, 1976)
and in a graphic novel by Paolo Cossi, La storia di Mara (S. Angelo in Formis: Lavieri, 2006).
In the field of popular music, various contributions include Yo Yo Mundi’s “Chi ha portato quei fiori per Mara Cagol?” (1994) and Moltheni’s instrumental, “Gli occhi di Mara Cagol,” Splendore Terrore (2004).
Stefania Podda, Nome di battaglia Mara: Vita e morte di Margherita Cagol, il primo capo delle Br (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 2007), 25.
Donatella della Porta, “Left—Wing Terrorism in Italy,” in Terrorism in Context, ed. by Martha Crenshaw (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 105–59.
Richard Drake, The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 20.
Robin Morgan, The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism (New York: Norton, 1989).
Alison Jamieson, The Heart Attacked: Terrorism and Conflict in the Italian State (London: Boyars 1989);
David Moss, Italian Political Violence, 1969–1988: The Making and Unmaking of Meanings (Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1993);
Donatella della Porta, ed., Terrorismi in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1984);
Leonard Weinberg and William Lee Eubank, The Rise and Fall of Italian Terrorism (London: Westview Press, 1987);
Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988 (London: Penguin, 1990).
Giorgio Bocca, Gli anni del terrorismo: Storia della violenza politica in Italia dal ’70 ad oggi (Rome: Armando Curcio Editore, 1988), 113–14.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (Autumn): 1975, 6–18.
Caryl Rivers, Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women (London: University Press of New England, 2007), 8.
Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997), 45
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© 2013 Ruth Glynn
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Glynn, R. (2013). Press Representations of Italian Women Terrorists. In: Women, Terrorism, and Trauma in Italian Culture. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137341990_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137341990_3
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