CFP (Session): Italian Cinema in the Era of #MeToo—Canadian Association for Italian Studies (CAIS) 2019 Annual Conference

Convegno annuale / Annual Conference / Congrès annuel
Orvieto 2019

Call for Papers (Session)
Italian Cinema in the Era of #MeToo

“One of the first women to accuse Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault was Italian actress Asia Argento. Hailed in the U.S. for speaking out, she was attacked in her native country by commentators, both male and female.” (NPR Jan. 18, 2018)

According to Tania Modleski, “male power is…consolidated through cycles of crisis and resolution, whereby men ultimately deal with the threat of female power by incorporating it” (O’Rawe 2014, 7). While there is a certain (lamentable) universality to the forms taken by this kind of masculinist incorporation or recuperation of the feminine, on the one hand, or its oppression or negation, on the other, the situation in the Italian cultural context is arguably even more acute than elsewhere. As Stephen Gundle observes, despite changing conceptions of national identity, “feminine beauty has long been associated with Italy, and…‘feminine beauty came to enjoy a near-monopoly of representational functions, symbolic purposes and popular manifestations’” (ibid., 2).

Beginning in 2017, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal (which Italian actor Asia Argento was amongst the first to break), the ‘#MeToo’ movement emerged in the U.S., quickly spreading around the world. This panel proposes to explore the state of Italian cinema in the era of ‘#MeToo’—whether in terms of style and/or production, reception and/or spectatorship, star studies and/or celebrity culture, cultural vs. film narratives, feminist-psychoanalytic and/or ideological critiques, representation of gender, post-representational approaches, (i.e. affect theory, posthumanist approaches), or other possible topics or approaches. The panel focus is not limited to contemporary Italian film, and historically informed comparisons of older and more recent films are encouraged.

References
Catherine O’Rawe, Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Please, submit your proposal to Russell Kilbourn, English and Film Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University, rkilbourn@wlu.ca, by February 28, 2019.

CAIS Conference 2019 / ACEI Conférence 2019: http://www.canadiansocietyforitalianstudies.camp7.org/Conference-2019