'It has to mean something...': Reading the success of the Italian soap opera Vivere

This article attempts to provide an answer to this question and reveal the reasons for the success of Vivere(Living), one of the first soap operas to be set and produced entirely in Italy over the last few years. Both text analysis and audience reception analysis are used to prove a specific hypothesis: that its popularity - which is comparable to no other Italian soap - comes from its ability to allow viewers to identify with its characters without forsaking the typical ingredients of a Hollywood series, central to the TV habits of the Italian audience. Here, soap operas - the ultimate popular narrative - are considered in their twin roles of 'anthropological repertory' and breeding ground for an active production of cultural meanings. The article relates the success of Vivereto the social assets of the country which produces and consumes it, while discussing the social uses of a home-grown soap opera through which the community portrays itself

Comment on Bandelli and Porcelli/1 - Against Moral Panic, in Defence of Data

Elisa Giomi’s commentary is an answer to Bandelli and Porcelli’s essay “Femicide in Italy. ‘Femminicidio,’ Moral Panic and Progressivist Discourse” [2016]. Although Giomi assumes that Bandelli and Porcelli effectively illustrate the instrumentalization of lethal violence against women in Italian political discourse, yet she criticizes their reading of the “femminicidio narrative” as a phenomenon of moral panic that locates the threat in the typical Italian heterosexual family/couple: all the available empirical findings confirm that these are precisely the contexts where lethal aggressions against women most frequently occur. The author also disagrees with the authors’ conclusion that the femminicidio narrative authorized “the application of a gender paradigm to the official reading of domestic/partner violence” in 2012/13 Italian public discourse. Finally, she contends that in their essay the “feminist discourse” is represented in a stereotypical way, one that is instrumental in depicting it as a hegemonic discourse

Neppure con un fiore? La violenza sulle donne nei media italiani

1Il saggio costituisce la prima pubblicazione dei risultati di una ricerca di durata triennale, dedicata all’analisi della copertura giornalistica degli omicidi di donne in Italia. Sono state prese in esame tutte le notizie in tema trasmesse dalle edizioni di prime time dei tre TG Rai e dai tre TG Mediaset nel 2006, quando, sulla scorta di delitti come quello di Hina Saleem, si è registrato l’inizio di un allarme sociale per l’integrità fisica e sessuale delle donne. I delitti commessi nel 2006 sono stati 162, oggetto di 473 servizi complessivamente trasmessi dalle 6 testate. L’analisi quantitativa svolta sugli stessi ha mostrato come la copertura giornalistica alteri l’effettiva fisionomia del fenomeno, privilegiando le tipologie di autori, vittime e casi che nella realtà sono i meno diffusi. In particolare, emerge una netta sovraesposizione dei cittadini non Comunitari, confermata dall’esame dei 7 casi di saturation coverage (i più notiziati del 2006): devono la loro “popolarità” anche al fatto di presentare uno o più immigrati nel ruolo di aggressori, o, più spesso, di sospettati. Il saggio analizza infine i risultati dell’analisi qualitativa svolta sui 250 servizi dedicati a questi 7 casi. Il discorso giornalistico li inserisce entro due frames, quello dello “scontro fra culture” e quello dell’emergenza criminalità, entrambi destinati a alimentare una retorica anti-immigrazione. Sulla base dei risultati dell’analisi, si conclude che la violenza contro le donne, in Italia, è stata raccontata in forme tali da legittimarne la classificazione come fenomeno di «panico morale», in cui gli immigrati hanno interpretato il ruolo dei «folk devils» mentre quello della cronaca televisiva può essere efficacemente descritto dalla categoria di «agente di indignazione morale».reservedmixedE. GIOMIGiomi, Elis

La rappresentazione delle violenze maschili contro le donne nei media. Frame, cause e soluzioni del problema nei programmi RAI

This contribution explores the representation of gender violence in RAI (Italian public broadcaster) programs, by presenting the results of the frame analysis carried out on 181 items. The empirical evidences discussed in this contribution come from the ‘Monitoring of the representation of the female figure in RAI programs’ (2016 and 2017), commissioned by RAI to the team made up by ISIMM Ricerche and Università di Roma Tre. The analysis carried out on these programs showed that, despite the great differences between genres, RAI productions have gradually moved from framing gender violence as a private/interpersonal issue to framing it as a problem rooted in the gender relations order. Nonetheless, ‘episodic’ framing, which focuses disproportionately on the individual circumstances of an isolated incident/story (K. E. Carlyle et al., 2008; R. Taylor, 2009), is still largely diffused

Public and Private, Global and Local in Italian Crime Drama: the case of "La Piovra"

This chapter analyzes the TV series 'La Piovra'. It is argued that, as the series progressed, it increasingly departed from ‘social melodrama’ - as the original concept was labeled – and drew closer to the U.S. serials. At first sight, the main outcomes were a more superficial and apoliticalthe portray of Italian society; storylines being stuffed with spectacular actions and a great component of romance; civic values being replaced by private concerns as the ultimate reasons for the protagonist's heroism and involvement in the struggle against Mafia. The main element of originality of this work consists in the attempt to analyze the evolution of 'La Piovra' using the analytical categories provided by studies on globalization and cultural adaptations of media contents. In particular, I used the notion of ‘transculturalization’ (Chan and Ma, 2002) to claim that 'La Piovra'’s borrowings from US police series, far from being simply transplanted, were actively recontextualized in a way that they could appeal to the national audience. Recontextualizing meant turning the tough and unscrupulous ‘lonely avenger’ found in US action and police series in a 'tragic hero', like Cattani, conscious of being a looser but still determined. The reason for such an adaptation was to provide a portray of the struggle between the forces of the law and Mafia likely to exorcise the audience’s fears without giving up the program’s claim for social realism