Maria Elena D’Amelio at the convivial Soroptimist
Beautiful convivial Soroptimist evening in the garden of the Cesare restaurant on Wednesday 22 June. To the delicacies of the chef Graziano Canarezza is added a very interesting intervention by Dr. Maria Elena D’Amelio, professor of the degree course in Communication and Digital Media of the University of San Marino, on the theme The last female taboo: role and role of mother in the media, from the postwar period to today. The professor, who is currently working on a monograph on stardom and motherhood in cinema and the media, mainly deals with cinema, media and gender studies. You have to your credit the publication of the book Ercole il divo (AIEP 2013) and the volume Italian Motherhood on Screen (Palgrave 2016) with Giovanna Faleschini Lerner. The theme proposed by D’Amelio is part of the analysis of cultural and social stereotypes, which underlie the gender differences that the optimist works to overcome. The evolution of female representations in the media from the post-war period to today has marked and accompanied the parallel evolution of gender roles in society. Today advertising is indignant in seeing stereotyped representations of women, such as that of the housewife, while the media – from advertising to TV series – try to promote a progressive vision of women, from Ikea girl scientists to the new heroines of Marvel films. Yet, there is a role that seems unable to overcome the rigid boundaries of the gender stereotype: that of the mother. Especially in Italy, it has crystallized in a series of radicalized representations in the topos of the mater dolorosa and in the maternal sacrifice, still difficult to unhinge today, which the feminist historian Lea Melandri has defined as “the last taboo”. Starting from current examples, such as the controversy over Samantha Cristoforetti or the one about mom-influencers like Chiara Ferragni, and going backwards in the exploration of the divas mothers of the cinema of the 50s-60s, during the intervention D’Amelio has first of all, the media representations of motherhood in Italy are reconstructed from a cultural history point of view. In the reflection on the role and identity meaning of being a mother, which followed, she then re-proposed the theme of the bad mother, emblematically represented by the myth of Medea, and subjected the ambivalence of the maternal, still so relevant, to the public’s reflection. The Soroptimist Club warmly thanks everyone present.
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