Brunetti, Francesca. Spaghetti. Silk printing, 2016.

The Incursions of the Southern Italian Woman into the Discourse of Man: A Drawing and Collage Project about Gender, Language, and Geography



Francesca Brunetti, EODIAH Fellow

In my talk I analyze the identity of the southern Italian woman and the stereotypical way she is represented in media to reflect on how I can operate a reconfiguration of her image. The southern Italian woman is usually represented in media as hypersexualized, maternal, submissive, emotional, and with no power and agency outside the domestic space. In opposition to these narratives, in my art I intend to refer to unconventional descriptions of the southern Italian woman narrated by contemporary Italian women writers, such as: the Neapolitan Elena Ferrante, the Sicilian Goliarda Sapienza, and the Roman Afro-Italian Igiaba Scego. In the work of these authors the southern Italian women characters are portraited as antimaternal and aggressive (Lila in Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, 2011), gendered as non-binary (Modesta in Sapienza’s The Art of Joy, 1994), and multi-ethnic (as Scego in her autobiographical novels My Home is Where I Am, 2013, and Adua, 2015). In my theoretical work I am planning on adopting feminist philosophy to examine these narrations and to locate alternative models of the women subjects. At the same time, I intend to visually represent these women in my art. By doing this I want my art to work as an expansion and development of my theoretical investigation and as a way of producing knowledge about feminist issues.

At the Edith O'Donnell Institute, UT Dallas Arts and Technology Building, [ATEC] Room 2.705E.

Free.

Open to the public.








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