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Seeing the Unseen, Staging the Unspoken: The Gender Politics and Political Language of Emma Dante’s Theatre in the Berlusconi Era (1994-2011)

Spedalieri, Francesca
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7594-3789
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1480594504188268

Abstract Details

2017, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Theatre.
The invisibility of Italian contemporary women directors in Italy and abroad is symptomatic of how Italian theatre is studied in the Anglophone academy and the concerning gender inequality and misogyny widespread in Italy during the Berlusconi Era (1994-2011). This dissertation looks at this grossly understudied aspect of Italian theatre by examining the role that Sicilian director Emma Dante (b. 1967), her company Sud Costa Occidentale, and her works played in the 1994-2011 Italian theatre landscape. This study reads her staging of female bodies, her theatrical works as a whole, and her directorial persona for attitudes towards women in the context of Sicilian and Italian culture. It analyzes the individual stories told in Dante’s La trilogia della famiglia siciliana (The Trilogy of the Sicilian Family, 2001-2004), Cani di Bancata (Market Dogs, 2006), and Trilogia degli occhiali (The Eyeglasses Trilogy, 2011) as vehicles to denounce the symbolic and systemic violence targeting and oppressing Italian women. Although primarily based on text and performance analysis, feminist and body theory also undergird the explorations undertaken in this study. This work is historiographically guided and rooted in contemporary Italian cultural studies, as it reconstructs the context in which Dante’s plays were written. Chapter 1 provides the historical, sociological, and cultural background necessary to frame to rest of the dissertation. Chapter 2 presents the lower-class Sicilian women in La trilogia della famiglia siciliana as doubly marginalized by their gender and socio-economic status. It explores how the financial disparity between the sexes, the gender roles, and the violence perpetuated against women depicted in the Trilogy point at gender issues such as economic inequality, Catholic Church-backed ideas predicating the submission of women to men, and gendered killings. Chapter 3 paints mafia realities as controlled by both regional and national power dynamics regulated by laws of silence and behavior, and strengthened by the corruption and complicity of governmental and religious institutions. It then dissects the female imagery in Cani di bancata, depicting southern Italian women living in mafia-controlled regions as perennially subordinated to men and marginalized within mafia organizations, where they are idealized by male fantasies and relegated to traditional gender roles. Chapter 4 discusses Trilogia degli occhiali focusing on Ballarini. It portrays the last play of the Trilogy as questioning gendered ageism through an investigation of the representation of old age and the presence/absence of older women’s bodies in the media, the structure of the play itself, and the actors’ performances of age and the aging process. Beyond summarizing the arguments made in preceding chapters and outlining future research, Chapter 5 looks at Dante’s public persona as continuing her questioning of gender inequality, gender roles, and mediatized gendered bodies. Finally, translations of the seven plays analyzed and a list of works directed by Dante are provided in the appendix. In addition to assisting with textual analysis, these translations offer scripts that could be used by Anglophone scholars for future research on Italian theatre and by English language theatre companies to stage Dante’s works.
Lesley Ferris (Advisor)
Jennifer Schlueter (Advisor)
Ana Elena Puga (Committee Member)
Charles Klopp (Committee Member)
429 p.
European Studies; Performing Arts; Romance Literature; Theater; Theater History; Theater Studies; Womens Studies
Emma Dante; Italian Theatre; Berlusconi; Women Directors; Translation; Misogyny; Miriano; Italian Studies; Italian Plays; Mafia; Old Age; Regional Languages; Dialects; Zanardo; mPalermu; Carnezzeria; Vita Mia; Cani di Bancata; Acquasanta; Zisa; Ballarini;

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Spedalieri, F. (2017). Seeing the Unseen, Staging the Unspoken: The Gender Politics and Political Language of Emma Dante’s Theatre in the Berlusconi Era (1994-2011) [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1480594504188268

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Spedalieri, Francesca. Seeing the Unseen, Staging the Unspoken: The Gender Politics and Political Language of Emma Dante’s Theatre in the Berlusconi Era (1994-2011). 2017. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1480594504188268.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Spedalieri, Francesca. "Seeing the Unseen, Staging the Unspoken: The Gender Politics and Political Language of Emma Dante’s Theatre in the Berlusconi Era (1994-2011)." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1480594504188268

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1480594504188268
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.