Una Guerra Particolare: Intimate, Performative Narratives Subverting Gender Roles and Sexuality During Italy’s Feminist Movement in the 1970s

Abstract

This work endeavors to show a critical peek into Italian history through a feminist lens placed over literature and film from the 1970s that examines the artistic ways in which women crafted their narratives, exposed trauma, and allowed spaces for healing. Though important to the overall development of Dacia Maraini and Ettore Scola’s work, their creative voices, and ultimately their success, Donna in guerra and Una giornata particolare were created early in their careers, and therefore warranted an examination for not only their impact during the time of their release, but for their continued relevance through the years. Scola went on to direct some forty films in just as many years, and Maraini continues to write incisive and political stories to this day that still enrich political and social discourse. As representative artifacts of feminist literature and film respectively, Dacia Maraini’s Donna in guerra and Ettore Scola’s Una gionata particolare trace efforts within the arts to shed light on and ultimately stop the policing of women’s bodies and voices. Using both works as models, this project highlights the cues in narrative structure and imagery, employ familiar elements, whether food or quotidian objects to recreate and shape the ethos in which the stories are placed, and to incite understanding and a desire to change the status quo in the audience. Focus is placed specifically on leitmotifs in the everyday, specifically food, fishing, and cooking; the ways in which the past is reframed and staged in both the text and film by rearranging memory to expose trauma through the vehicle of storytelling itself; and the specific modes of storytelling, vis-à-vis intimate and epistolary narratives. Due to the accessibility of popular media, this mode of introducing political consciousness has been highlighted as a democratizing learning tool not only by providing the outlets themselves and fostering community between artists, but because they allow audiences the benefit of understanding and a sense of urgency. Maraini and Scola purposefully subvert the media of literature and film to allow audiences a clear delineation between what has been the norm and what needs to change.