After providing a short overview of the main forms of the crime dramas that have circulated on Italian broadcast TV since the networks’ inceptions, section 1, ‘ Voiceless and its context: crime drama on Italian TV’ examines the impact of original content produced by pay TV and SVOD platforms on the audiovisual sector, and focuses on the new production strategies developed by public broadcaster Rai to face the challenges represented by the increasingly relevant ‘complex’ narratives and ‘quality’ productions. The first two sections aim to retrace the context in which Voiceless was produced and received by Italian audiences. Moreover, we will provide a comparative analysis of the depiction of gender violence in both Voiceless and Unbelievable, considering how the plot’s feminist premises of the two miniseries are developed in regards of the representation of victims and survivors of sexual assault. Our aim is to provide a production and text-based analysis of Voiceless, combined with feminist media theories, for a critical reflection on the gender politics of the crime genre in contemporary Italy. Indeed, this Netflix production has been widely praised for its respectful depiction of sexual violence survivors and the psychological complexity of their female investigator characters, also in respect to their personal and family lives. Moreover, the representation of victims and survivors of gender violence in Voiceless is portrayed with a feminist sensibility that echoes the American miniseries Unbelievable. In our analysis of Voiceless, we claim that the Italian miniseries complicates and problematises this narrative through the constructions of a female detective who-while reminiscent of the Nordic Noir type-is also adapted to the cultural context of Mediterranean Italy. (Klein 1995: 4) Dresner expanded this perspective, suggesting how detective qualities are traditionally and culturally coded as masculine-either in the hyper-rationality of the intellectual detective, or the casual violence of the hardboiled detective. This confirms Klein’s assumptions that the script labelled ‘detective’ in readers’ minds has no natural overlap, with the label ‘woman’. Well-known Nordic Noir examples, such The Bridge (2011-2018) and The Killing (2007-2012), present female investigators who are brilliant in their profession but dysfunctional in their private lives, incapable of having meaningful sentimental relations and a gratifying social life. In 2020, Rai Fiction (the production branch of Italian public broadcaster Rai, the most relevant player in terms of investments in televisual production) and the production company Cattleya co-produced Voiceless (original title Bella da morire, Deadly Beautiful), a miniseries of 8 episodes centred on Eva Cantini, a police detective specialised in sex-based hate crimes, which in Italian are referred to as femminicidi (femicide): the killing of a woman, in particular by a man, on account of her gender.Įva Cantini is part of a growing numbers of televisual female detectives in recent American and European productions who disrupt assumptions related not only to the manliness of the detective profession, but also to the discursive meanings regarding gender relations, representation of gender violence, and the female gaze. Call for Papers: Dead Women & Gendered Death in Visual Culture.Call for Papers: Intersectional Selves: Feminist Self-portraiture.Akwugo Emejulu on George Floyd Protests.Polish #strajkkobiet Tells the Government to ‘Fuck Off’.The Sarah Everard Clapham Common Vigil: London,.Global Sisterhood: Focus on Afghan Women.The Hate Speech Directed at Amber Heard Must Unite Women Against Resistance to Our Voices.Heard/Depp: A Movement Built on Absence & What I’m Not Saying.To Take My/Our Past and Future Selves Back: Woman, Life, Freedom.Focus Issue Four: New Materialist Practice (Summer 2019). ![]() Focus Issue Five: Feminist Pedagogies (Winter 2020).Focus Issue Six: COVID-19 Crisis-Connection-Culture (Autumn 2020).Focus Issue Seven: Female Detectives on TV (Summer 2021).Focus Issue Eight: Feminist Craft (Autumn 2021).Focus Issue Nine: Photography & Resistance (Summer 2022). ![]()
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