| This dissertation explores the connections between "women's films" (romantic comedies and melodramas), romance novels, glossy fashion magazines, and advertisements, my dissertation project is an inter-medial study of transnational cultural products during the interwar period. While examining the complex and contradictory representations of women in Italian society, I also trace the many ways in which they intersected with American popular culture and the transnational iterations of the New Woman. Similar to the early American suffragists and feminists, the modern Italian woman's quest for empowerment, emancipation, and equality became intertwined with the rise of a consumer culture. "Everybody's Woman" shows that with the penetration of mass media combined with the emergence of the department store and the democratization of fashion, more women challenged old social conventions and power structures as they had greater access to self-fashioning. In so doing, I demonstrate that these new female paradigms and typologies resist either/or categorization. Rather, as hybrid figures, they are not entirely foreign, Italian, domestic, extra-domestic, tradition, or modern. Instead they largely represent the space in-between all of the above. In this indeterminate state, these women exemplify free-floating agencies with far-reaching, unpredictable ramifications that transcend the binaries of objectified or liberated. As such, I show that the nature of becoming visible is a potential vehicle for empowerment as well as oppression. Images of this new female typology underscore the complexities associated with modernity and agency as they vacillate between the traditional (the donna madre, the "authentic," the maternal, the domestic) and the modern (the donna crisi, the "artificial," the cosmopolitan). The texts through which I analyze these disparities and develop my historiographical and comparative approach are: Church and State archival documents, advertisements, the popular woman's fashion magazine Eva, and Marcello Dudovich's poster art and ads (Chapter 1); Salvator Gotta's romanzi rosa (romance novels) (Chapter 2); "women's films" (romantic comedies and melodramas) (Chapter 3 and 4). By privileging this array of popular materials, images, and phenomena, my project reveals the ways in which society's self-imag(in)ings of gender are shaped and reconstructed through various mass media. |
