House of Cards e la politica dello stile

House of Cards, serie televisiva prodotta dalla Netflix, costituisce una assoluta novità nel panorama della serialità televisiva e nell’ambito specifico dei political drama. Prodotto dallo spiccato carattere autoriale – tanto da poter essere inserita all’interno del filone della Quality Tv - House of Cards è stata pubblicizzata come il primo caso di prodotto offerto dal canale ai propri abbonati in streaming in un’unica volta a partire dal 1 febbraio 2013. Questo lavoro muove dall’ipotesi che il successo di House of Cards poggi su due elementi: a) da un lato, House of Cards – in quanto political drama che mette in dialogo politica e cultura popolare – offre al proprio pubblico un modo per attivare nuove forme di alfabetizzazione alla politica; b) dall’altro lato, la serie tv garantisce ai politici stessi un efficace strumento attraverso cui gestire il proprio stile rappresentativo. Grazie alla presenza di alcuni elementi stilistici inediti – la presenza di un eroe dall’attitudine cinica con Frank Underwood e il suo sguardo in camera – House of Cards offre ai politici una vera e propria enciclopedia intertestuale a cui attingere per rilanciare la propria rappresentazione all’interno dei nuovi spazi di visibilità e interattività offerti dai social media. Appropriandosi di pratiche legate alla fan culture, i politici stanno imparando ad usare le serie tv come uno strumento alternativo per raccontare la propria politica, finendo per sfidare la legittimità e l’applicabilità delle forme di comunicazione più tradizionali

Networked Intimacy. Intimacy and Friendship among Italian Facebook users

In this paper, we describe the results of a qualitative study conducted with 120 Italian Facebook users to investigate how Facebook enables people to achieve a mutually constitutive intimacy with their own friendship network: a negotiation of intimacy in public through self-disclosure, where the affordances of the platform are useful to elicit significant reactions, validations and demonstrations of affection from others. We observed that, in order to achieve various levels of intimacy on Facebook, people engage in various strategies: Showing rather than telling, Sharing implicit content, Tagging, Expectation of mutual understanding and Liking. These strategies produce a collaborative disclosure that relies on others’ cooperation to maintain the boundaries between private and public space. Based on these premises, we developed a framework of collaborative strategies for managing public intimacy that both systematizes and extends the findings identified in previous studies of intimacy on Facebook. We describe this framework as networked intimacy and we discuss the consequences of it in the light of already existing research on online self-disclosure

THERE ARE MALE TEARS IN THAT COMMENT SECTION. THE DISCURSIVE NEGOTIATION OF MASCULINITY IN ITALIAN ONLINE MEN'S GROUPS

Despite the consolidation of works on the heterogeneous nature of the so-called Manosphere, a lot of these studies consider masculinity as an overall governing force of men’s behaviors. This is has led to overlooking how subject positioning is always negotiated in multiple and contradictory discourses that are not easily captured by structurally oriented frameworks such as hegemonic or toxic masculinity. By focusing on the recent third development in men’s critical studies of masculinity, this work seek to investigates the discursive construction of masculinity in digital environment, in order to identify the various resources, in the form of established repertoires, that men use to position themselves in relation to conventional discourses of the masculine, and how masculinity both impinges upon and is transformed by those practices. Using a qualitative methodology, we analyze the content of two Facebook Pages dedicated to men's rights issues, called Antisessismo (Antisexism) and Diritti Maschili – Equità e Umanità (Men’s rights – Equity and Humanity). Our findings suggest that in these groups, masculinity is rarely negotiated or discussed but it is assumed as a common sense, providing a basis for shared social understandings. However, there is no unitary meaning to this common sense of masculinity, on the contrary, it contains many contradictory or competing arguments. Individuals are positioned by discourses, but, as our data demonstrate, these identity positions are by no means stable and consistent: users can shift between different modes of masculinity and actively re-create positions for themselves, especially in response to “trouble”

Comunicazionepuntodoc (2013). Vol. 8: Soggetto/soggetti. Percorsi dell'identità nell'epoca moderna

Tradizionalmente il concetto di sorveglianza è stato associato a forme di potere dal carattere gerarchico e rapporti di forza sbilanciati. Questa popolare visione distopica, tuttavia, non è efficace se applicata alle pratiche dello sguardo che caratterizzano un social network fortemente visuale come Facebook, dove osservarsi e tenere traccia dei comportamenti altrui è diventata ormai una pratica routinaria. Lungi dal costituire una mera invasione dello sguardo rispetto alla vita privata propria o quella altrui, su Facebook, tale sorveglianza rappresenta piuttosto una pratica partecipativa di connessione e condivisione reciproca. A partire dall’analisi dei dati ricavati da una ricerca qualitativa condotta attraverso 120 interviste in profondità a utenti selezionati lungo tutto il territorio italiano, verranno individuate le principali finalità che sottendono alle più diffuse forme di osservazione reciproca che avvengono su Facebook: contatto, confronto, scoperta e controllo

No Country for Men. Negotiating Men’s Rights Activism in Digital Spaces

In the past ten years there have been intense debates in masculinity studies about transformations in men’s behaviour and their impact on gender relations. A significant part of these debates is dedicated to trying to understand how white heterosexual masculinities are produced and buttressed in Internet settings, as demonstrated by the increasing amount of knowledge about the heterogeneous nature of the so-called manosphere, a loose confederacy of online communities, focusing on issues concerning men and masculinity (Schmitz & Kazyak, 2016; Nagle, 2017; Marwick & Caplan, 2018). Moreover, most of the research on this phenomenon focus on the US context, and in rare cases on other Anglophone realities (such as Australia and Canada), while in Italy this field of studies is only starting to emerge and is limited to few works like Farci and Righetti (2019), Vingelli (2019), Cannito and Mercuri (2021), and Dordoni and Magaraggia (2021). This article attempts to investigate Italian MRAs on the Internet and their connection with the recent emergence of the manosphere. To do so, the essay analyses the content of two of the most prominent Facebook Pages dedicated to men's rights issues, called Diritti Maschili – Equità e Umanità (Men’s rights – Equity and Humanity) and Antisessismo (Antisexism). Employing the principles of critical discursive psychological approach (Edley, 2001; Wetherell & Edley, 1999), the article investigates the discursive constructions of MRA activism in digital environment and identifies a range of linguistic resources, called interpretative repertoires, that members can utilize in the course of their everyday interactions on these pages. Exploring how members can use different, and often conflicting, interpretative repertoires to make sense of their investment in anti-sexist, anti-feminist, and pro male groups, this work aims at demonstrating how difficult it is to define contemporary MRA movement in terms of a clearly defined worldview. Although the MRA is now considered an identity category in popular debates, it is possible to distinguish activists who are convincedly anti-feminist from those who are really worried about men’s issues. Focusing on such heterogeneity could be a crucial first step in bridging the divide between the men’s rights movement and feminism, which are still seen as opposing sides in the fight for gender equality