‘Ci sono troie in giro in Parlamento che farebbero di tutto’
Italian female politicians seen through a sexual lens
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.24572Keywords:
gendered discourse, male chauvinism, politics, Italy, female politicians, sexismAbstract
Italian female politicians are increasingly gaining access to the institutional public space, in some cases breaking the glass ceiling that has blocked them from reaching high positions. However, language used to attack them for their possible wrong doings or employed to represent themselves demonstrates that a rearrangement of a gendered xed order is constantly challenged by (those in) a culture and society that still sees women as mainly pertaining to the private sphere. In this article, I qualitatively investigate sexual terms, directly and indirectly sexist, used by a variety of actors (journalists, comedians, politicians) attempting to prove women’s unsuitability for political roles and, more broadly, for operating in the institutional public sphere. To examine these terms, I developed a framework which takes into consideration communicative functions (stereotypes, gossip and self-representation), aimed at providing a comprehensive and context-dependent investigation into how language is purposefully used to re-establish a known gendered structure (only men in the institutional sphere). Nexus analysis, borrowed from anthropologists Ron Scollon and Suzanne Scollon, is here performed in order to show how language is intrinsically linked to an ideologically gendered order which speakers seem to reproduce through linguistic practices. This article contributes to previous literature on Italy as a highly sexist culture as well as that on representation of female professionals operating in domains which have been historically inhabited by men. It also offers a methodological tool to investigate sexist terms employed in the media and in political spaces.
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Sabatini, A. (1987) Raccomandazioni per un Uso Non Sessista Della Lingua Italiana, Commissione nazionale per la realizzazione della parità tra uomo e donna, Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri. Retrieved on 22 July 2017 from www.innovazionepa.it/dipartimento/documentazione/documentazione_pari_opportunita.htm.
Scollon, R. and Scollon, S. (2004) Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. London: Routledge.
Shaw, S. (2006) Governed by the rules? The female voice in parliamentary debates. In J. Baxter (ed.) Speaking Out: The Female Voice in Public Contexts 81–102. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522435_5
Sunderland, J. (2004) Gendered Discourses. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505582
Talbot, M. (2003). Gender stereotypes: reproduction and challenge. In J. Holmes and M. Meyerhoff (eds) The Handbook of Language and Gender 468–86. Oxford: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470756942.ch20
Aspesi, N. (2014) Venerdi un complesso maschile. La Repubblica (7 February). Retrieved on 22 July 2017 from www.ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2014/02/07/venerdi-un-complesso-maschile.html?ref=search.
Baxter, J. (2012) Women of the corporation: a sociolinguistic perspective of senior women’s leadership language in the UK. Journal of Sociolinguistics 16: 81–107. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00520.x
Bengoechea, M. (2011) How effective is ‘femininity’? Media portrayals of the effectiveness of the first Spanish Woman Defence Minister. Gender and Language 2: 405–29. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v5i2.405
Caldas-Coulthard, C. R. (1996) Women who pay for sex. And enjoy it. Transgression versus morality in women’s magazines. In C. R. Caldas-Coulthard and M. Coulthard (eds) Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis 250–70. London: Routledge.
Cameron, D. (ed.) (1998) The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader. London: Routledge.
Cameron, D. (2006a) Theorising the female voice in public contexts. In J. Baxter (ed.) Speaking Out: The Female Voice in Public Contexts 3–20. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522435_1
Cameron, D. (2006b) On Language and Sexual Politics. London: Routledge.
Cameron, D. (2007) The Myth of Mars and Venus. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cameron, D. and Shaw, S. (2016) Gender, Power and Political Speech: Women and Language in the 2015 UK General Election. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58752-7
Eckert, P. and McConnell-Ginet, S. (2003) Language and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511791147
Formato, F. (2014) Language used and Gender in the Italian Parliament. PhD thesis, Lancaster University, Lancaster.
Formato, F. (2016) Linguistic markers of sexism in the Italian media: a case study of ministra and ministro. Corpora 11: 371–99. https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2016.0100
Formato, F. (forthcoming) Gender, Discourse and Ideology in Italian. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fusco, F. (2012) La lingua e il femminile nella lessicografia italiana: tra rappresentazione stereotipata e (in)visibilità. Turin: Edizioni dell’orso.
Gal, S. (2002) A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13: 77–95. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-13-1-77
Garcia-Blanco, I. and Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2012) The discursive construction of women politicians in the European press. Feminist Media Studies 12: 422–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2011.615636
Gill, R. (2008) Gender and the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gill, R. (2011) Sexism reloaded, or, it’s time to get angry again! Feminist Media Studies 11: 61–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2011.537029
Gill, R. (2012) The sexualisation of culture?. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 6: 483–98. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2012.00433.x
Guaraldo, O. (2011) (In)significante padrone: media sesso e potere nell’Italia contemporanea. In C. Chirico (ed.) Filosofia di Berlusconi 97–128. Verona: Ombre Corte.
Gundle, S. (2000) Il bel paese: art, beauty and the cult of appearance. In G. Bedani (ed.) The Politics of Italian National Identity 106–36. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Gundle, S. (2007) Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hipkins, D. (2011) ‘Whore-ocracy’: show girls, the beauty trade-off, and mainstream oppositional discourse in contemporary Italy. Italian Studies 66: 413–30. https://doi.org/10.1179/007516311X13134938224529
Holmes, J. and Marra, M. (2010) Current trends in femininity, feminism and gendered discourse. In J. Holmes and M. Marra (eds) Femininity, Feminism and Gendered Discourse 1–20. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Johnson, S. and Ensslin, A. (2007) ‘But her language skills shifted the family dynamics dramatically’: Language, gender and the construction of publics in two British newspapers. Gender and Language 2: 229–54. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v1i2.229
Kanter, R. M. (1993) Men and Women of the Corporation. New York: Basic Books.
Litosseliti, L. (2006) Constructing gender in public arguments: the female voice as emotional voice. In J. Baxter (ed) Speaking Out: The Female Voice in Public Contexts 40–57. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522435_3
Litosseliti, L. and Sunderland, J. (2002) Gender identity and discourse analysis: theoretical and empirical considerations. In L. Litosseliti and J. Sunderland (eds) Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis 1–39. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.2
Mills, S. (2008) Language and Sexism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511755033
Mills, S. and Mullany, L. (2011) Language, Gender and Feminism. Abingdon: Routledge.
Repubblica (2012) Grillo: ‘Il consenso a Salsi e Favia? Fiducia da poche decine di persone’. La Repubblica (15 November). Retrieved on 22 July 2017 from www.repubblica.it/politica/2012/11/15/news/grillo_salsi_e_favia_fiducia_da_pochi-46701067.
Sabatini, A. (1986) Raccomandazioni per un Uso Non Sessista Della Lingua Italiana. Roma: Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri. Retrieved on 22 July 2017 from www.funzionepubblica.gov.it/media/277361/linguaggio_ non_sessista.pdf.
Sabatini, A. (1987) Raccomandazioni per un Uso Non Sessista Della Lingua Italiana, Commissione nazionale per la realizzazione della parità tra uomo e donna, Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri. Retrieved on 22 July 2017 from www.innovazionepa.it/dipartimento/documentazione/documentazione_pari_opportunita.htm.
Scollon, R. and Scollon, S. (2004) Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. London: Routledge.
Shaw, S. (2006) Governed by the rules? The female voice in parliamentary debates. In J. Baxter (ed.) Speaking Out: The Female Voice in Public Contexts 81–102. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522435_5
Sunderland, J. (2004) Gendered Discourses. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505582
Talbot, M. (2003). Gender stereotypes: reproduction and challenge. In J. Holmes and M. Meyerhoff (eds) The Handbook of Language and Gender 468–86. Oxford: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470756942.ch20
Published
2017-09-13
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Formato, F. (2017). ‘Ci sono troie in giro in Parlamento che farebbero di tutto’: Italian female politicians seen through a sexual lens. Gender and Language, 11(3), 389-414. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.24572
