Who wants to be a TV showgirl? Auditions, talent and taste in contemporary popular Italian cinema

Abstract

Contemporary discourse about the figure of the velina, or showgirl, in Italy rotates around, amongst other things, a misreading of (youthful) female spectatorship practices (O'Rawe), culture and ambitions, a profound confusion about how to read narrative film and television, and a fundamental resistance to 'popular' taste (O'Leary). I will examine how contemporary popular cinema in Italy has handled the figure of the velina through the recurrent trope of the audition, suggesting that it mobilizes a contradictory set of messages about the female body and agency that complicate the often Manichean discourses circulating in the current debate, and that it intersects with the debates about the 'sexualization of culture' and postfeminism in the Anglophone context. Developing my earlier work in this area, I will show, through reflection upon the theoretical prisms of class, taste, genre, and dance how popular Italian cinema nuances the often polarized velina debate.