Italy’s Other Women: Gender and Prostitution in Italian Cinema, 1940–1965 (Italian Modernities)

In the period 1940 to 1965 the female prostitute featured in at least ten per cent of all Italian-made films, but she cast her shadow over many more. With reference to the changing social and film industrial context, this book explains why the figure of the female prostitute was so prevalent in Italian cinema of this period and offers a new account of her on-screen presence. It shows that the prostitutes that populate Italian cinema are much more than simply 'tarts with hearts' or martyr figures. Via the constant reworking of the prostitute trope across genres, the figure takes us to the heart of many ideological contradictions in postwar Italian cinema and society: these include the entanglement of rhetoric about political truth with the suppression of postwar guilt and shame, fears about racial contamination, and a preoccupation with non-normative forms of masculine behaviour and desire. The book also shows how the female prostitute is important to Italian national cinema as a 'borderline identity', used to establish, but also destabilize, the hegemony of respectable femininities. It is precisely through her borderline condition, this book argues, that the prostitute 'haunts' gender, sometimes policing it, but more often than not problematizing its very construction. Cover Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Part I. Making Italians, Undoing Women: Getting Over the War Introduction to Part I 1. Ghosts of Prostitutes Past: Cinema and the Prostitute during World War II 2. Worry About the Girl: Whitewashing Italy After the War 3. The New Nation’s ‘Others’: Women with Money, Race and the South Part II. New Readings of Doubled Women in 1950s Cinema Introduction to Part II 4. Multiplication Anxiety: Contests and Falling Women 5. ‘The Brothel Series’: Activating Female Gazes 6. Marriage and Misrecognition: The Prostitute in Comedy of the 1950s Part III. From Sultans to Kept Men: Beyond the Merlin Law Introduction to Part III 7. The Fantasy Harem: The Battle of the Sexes in Italian Film Comedy of the Early to Mid-1960s 8. Clients and Lovers: Guilt, Shame and Pleasure 9. From Protectors to Kept Men: Masculinity and Melancholia Afterword Appendix: List of Italian Films Featuring Prostitutes, 1945–1965 Filmography Bibliography Index In the period 1940-1965 the female prostitute featured in at least 10 per cent of Italian-made films. This book explains why she was so prevalent in Italian cinema of this period and offers a new account of her on-screen presence. The author shows that prostitutes in Italian cinema are much more than simply 'tarts with hearts' or martyr figures.