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

Alessandra Gribaldo

doi:10.1017/mit.2018.5

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.

Highlights

In the spring of 2009, Italy’s prime minister Silvio Berlusconi became involved in scandals for allegedly having ensnared women, escorts1 and aspiring veline2 in private settings, requesting sexual services in exchange for promises of television appearances or political positions
Narratives of female freedom play a central role in Italian xenophobic discourses, such as that of the Lega Nord (Northern League) party, which was part of the political coalition ruling Italy at the times of the sex scandals. In analysing these discourses in politics and in the media, Bonfiglioli observed that representations of migrant women explicitly underlined their supposed backwardness and lack of freedom, as opposed to the inherently liberated figure of the European, white, Western woman (Bonfiglioli 2012, 79)
In my argument I have tried to foreground the multiplicity of devices at work in these public debates about gender, freedom and sexuality and the way they intertwine with class, race and generation

Summary

Introduction

In the spring of 2009, Italy’s prime minister Silvio Berlusconi became involved in scandals for allegedly having ensnared women, escorts and aspiring veline in private settings (meetings, parties and dinners), requesting sexual services in exchange for promises of television appearances or political positions. In analysing these discourses in politics and in the media, Bonfiglioli observed that representations of migrant women explicitly underlined their supposed backwardness and lack of freedom, as opposed to the inherently liberated figure of the European, white, Western woman (Bonfiglioli 2012, 79) She highlighted how in Italy these spheres represent privileged sites ‘for the discursive and material reproduction of multiple forms of oppression that are mutually intertwined and based on differences of gender, sexuality, race/religion/nationality and class’ (Bonfiglioli 2012, 79). The prosecutor’s words express the effort of reconciling agency and subalternity in the context of sexual-economic exchanges which, as discussed in the article, puts choice and coercion in tension and is imbued with gendered and racialised relations of power

Conclusion

Notes on contributor