Veline, ordinary women and male savages: Disentangling racism and heteronormativity in contemporary narratives on sexual freedom

Abstract

This article takes as its starting point the so-called ‘sex scandals’ surrounding Italy’s former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi during the last years of his premiership (2009–2011), which have filled Italian newspaper columns and legal case files. Political discourses and media interpretations of women’s freedom at the time represented genders through the eroticisation of power. The deployment of postfeminist and stereotyped representations of gender relations produced a complex and ambivalent frame for female sexuality and agency which reproduced the hegemonic neoliberal rhetoric that locates freedom and emancipation in the market. This narrative was further inflected by class and race, as it was deployed through the opposed images of white, Italian, respectable, caring women, and cynical young women and migrants using their bodies as a resource in a sexual-economic exchange with men occupying positions of power. Through feminist reflections on work I frame and discuss the use of the notions of choice and freedom in these discourses. Shifting the focus from women’s behaviour to the analysis of a peculiar image of masculinity displayed by the then premier, the article highlights how racism, colonial legacies and homophobia are enmeshed in this historically and culturally based gender imagery.

Identities and Intimacies on Social Media

“…The ambivalent situation in the Italian context produces a gender system that encourages girls' and women's selfachievement in a culture that reproduces many forms of sexism and misogyny (see Zambelli et al, 2018). Public debate carries a gendered moral panic on girls' sexuality, constantly seeking to augment the already strict separation between good, respectable women and bad, disreputable women (Gribaldo, 2018). This separation between 'good' and 'bad' is known as the double standard: different standards used to judge sexual acts committed by men or women.…”

Trans* time: Projecting transness in European (TV) series

“…In the second half of the first decade of the 21 st century, a succession of sex scandals involving trans women and prominent Italian men arguably dominated Italian public and media discourses (Gribaldo 2018;Israely 2009;Stanyer 2013, 122-123). 7 In these years, former Italian Prime Minister and media mogul, Silvio Berlusconi, also became involved in a series of alleged ------7 In October 2005, the grandson of the former head of FIAT Automobiles, Lapo Elkann was found overdosed on cocaine in the flat of a 53-year-old trans woman, Patrizia Broco.…”

“…dalliances with cisgender underage girls and escorts (Gribaldo 2018). Juxtaposing all these events, The Time journalist Jeffery Israely highlights how they all helped solidifying Berlusconi's reputation as "the real ladies' man" (Israely 2009).…”