This article engages with the postfeminist debate on girls’ sexuality in contemporary Italy. The huge popularity among adolescents of social network sites (SNSs), which involve a vast mobilisation of personal images, has given rise to new concerns and a moralising gender panic about girls’ sexuality. Drawing on critical girls’ studies, and based on the outputs of a qualitative research project, the article discusses the gender discourses that emerge from Italian girls’ digital practices on SNSs, with specific reference to girls’ online self-representation through posting and sharing photos on Facebook and other SNSs. The article explores how sexual regulation works among girls in the digital context by analysing the postfeminist norms of female sexual embodiment in contemporary Italian digital culture. In doing so, the article hopes to contribute to the transnational academic debate in media and cultural studies by showing the discursive and visual conditions of possibility which shape girls’ digital sexual subjectivity on social network sites.

This article investigates the role, reception, and socio-cultural, political relevance of mondo movies in the context of late 1950s–early 1980s film and documentary. The mondo genre debuted with reportage films about sexuality in Europe and reached its pinnacle with Gualtiero Jacopetti’s assemblage films. The historical context in which this genre evolved, and white masculinity was rearticulated and positioned at the centre of the national imagined community, is mapped focusing both on gender and race constructions and on the gaze identifying, encoding and decoding the sensationalist presentation of postcolonial/ decolonising Otherness. A brief review of some of the author’s published work on 1962–1971 mondo movies introduces Cannibal Holocaust (1979) and director Ruggero Deodato’s controversial reflection on the white, capitalist, sexist, Western and neo-colonial anthropological gaze.

The first British cultural institute on foreign soil was founded in Florence in 1917. However, it was the creation of the British Council in London in 1935 that marked the beginning of the strengthening of the British cultural presence abroad. The aim of this drive was to promote knowledge of British culture and civic and political life overseas, to defend national prestige and, given the escalating expansionist policies of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, to encourage the preservation of dialogue between the major European powers, underpinned by democratic principles. Bridging a gap in research into the relationship between Italy and Great Britain in the interwar period, this article reconstructs the case study of British cultural diplomacy in Florence between 1922 and Mussolini’s declaration of war, analysing how British culture was used in politics and propaganda and investigating the relationship of the management of both the British Institute of Florence and the British Council with Fascism. In doing so, it offers original insight into British history and the country’s cultural institutions in Fascist Italy, and into the wider field of Anglo-Italian political and cultural relations during the period of dictatorship in Italy.

Municipal fragmentation is a real historical issue in Italy but its relevance has been differently perceived over time. With a focus on the municipal unions and amalgamations as the main tools for defragmentation, we will present an overview of the last quarter century (1990–2017) of territorial policy at the local level. The reforms introduced since 2010 marked a step change in this area: in fact, empirical evidence shows that the most recent defragmentation attempts have had a certain success. This article, by maintaining a descriptive approach, will try to answer why the most recent defragmentation policy achieved some results, in contrast to those of the past. Some explanatory factors will be presented by reviewing the stances of the main actors in this policy field and their interaction with national policy-maker goals and approaches as well as with normative elements and external conditions.

This article concerns the processes of normalisation and medicalisation of transgender people’s experiences in Italy. Drawing on the analysis of the parliamentary debate which led to the endorsement of Law no. 164/1982, ‘Rules Concerning the Rectification of Sex-Attribution’, the article will foreground the (still) existing contradictions between trans people’s (ostensible) individual rights over their own gendered bodies, as enshrined in law, and their subjection to medico-legal supervision and control. Next, it will look at the relationship between transgender experience and the notion of citizenship: in particular, it will explore the opportunities and contradictions in the possibility of trans citizenship in the current Italian context.

The 1952 MoMA exhibition Olivetti: Design in Industry has come to mark the moment when the established art world recognized the cultural legitimacy of mass-produced goods. This article contests such an interpretation by showing how the exhibition was organised and paid for by the Olivetti company. This enables a comparative analysis of the MoMA exhibition with a second New York space, the Olivetti showroom. Located on Fifth Ave, less than a half kilometre from the museum, the Olivetti showroom sold the company’s products to the same American public. The article concludes that the MoMA exhibition and the New York Olivetti showroom must be understood together as a clever case of corporate marketing.

Disarmament and non-proliferation education is a key tool in curbing the spread of nuclear weapons, with a view to their elimination. This article examines the remarkable story of the International School on Disarmament and Research on Conflicts (ISODARCO) on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary of continuous engagement in educational and training activities. ISODARCO offers a unique forum where nuclear experts from different backgrounds and approaches can meet, debate, and promote action as a transnational knowledge-based network of experts and, equally important, pass on their expertise to the ‘next generation of non-proliferation specialists’. The contribution of this small Italian NGO is indeed noteworthy, highly praised at the national and especially international level, and worth the attention of an audience broader than just non-proliferation and security experts.

This essay explores attitudes towards home-grown anti-black racism in Italy from the 1960s to the early1980s by focusing on the reception of Giovanni Vento’s Il Nero, a 1965 film that depicts the everyday lives of two biracial Italians born at the end of the Second World War from encounters between Italian women and non-white Allied soldiers, and of Antonio Campobasso’s Nero di Puglia, a partly autobiographical book by one of these biracial Italians, published in 1980. Campobasso’s powerful text, which denounced the hypocrisies of the Republic, received some acknowledgement in the intellectual community, but the lenses that the cultural critics used to interpret the text impeded a foregrounding of the racism that the book denounced. Giovanni Vento’s innovative film, on the other hand, did not even reach the commercial circuit and was also interpreted in leftist circles through a political and aesthetic paradigm that downplayed the specificity of anti-black racism. The article invites a reflection on the legacy that these attitudes have had in shaping the limited sensitivity to racism in contemporary Italy.

This article traces the evolution of anti-semitism in post-war Italy, from the early responses to the Holocaust to the increasingly concerning signs of contemporary anti-Jewish prejudice. Tracing the discourses of religious and secular attitudes towards Jews, the piece shows how resilient certain stereotypes are, and how assumptions about citizenship continue to undermine the respect of difference in Italy. With a reflection that is meant to be personal and scholarly at the same time, this contribution has the aim of facilitating a broader reflection, that spans instances of anti-semitism among the anti-racist Left, the correlation between unresolved anti-Jewish prejudice and widespread racist, anti-immigrant discourses, the challenges of a politicised memorialisation of the Holocaust, and also the role Jewish communities may play in this unsettling context.

This article examines the surrogacy debate that has developed within contemporary feminist and LGBT movements in Italy, following the approval of the law on civil unions at the beginning of 2016. This debate has been marked by a deep fracture between those who see in surrogate motherhood a chance to imagine new forms of social bonds and those who consider that women’s wombs and newborn children can never be the object of an economic ‘exchange’. I will first analyse the most controversial positions held by some feminists who have participated in the debate, which revolve around the centrality of the maternal figure. Then I will outline a brief history of the social construction of pregnancy, linking it to changes in the marketplace and the birth of biopolitics. Finally, with the help of Angela Putino’s philosophical thought I will advance a potentially different feminist approach to the issue of surrogate motherhood.