DWF, 2004, n. 1-2. Mind the advertising

Advertising is present in our everyday experiences, subtly changing our perceptions - like it or not, it is a significant part of our lives. Trivial or creative, banal or surprising, it acts as a repertory of images and symbols, and may have consequences beyond its open aim of influencing our choices making us buy one or another product.

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MATERIA

PALLOTTA Clelia, Shooting the target, pp. 5-10

The author looks at "the cruel heart of advertising", i.e. its statutory need to turn human beings into targets: thus, the intricacy of human relations and the complexity of women's and men's existence - their desires, fears, loves and hates - are explored with no respect, from every angle and with all available tools, only in order to make them buy the goods that are being advertised.

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DEL MANSO Cinzia, The senses of advertising, pp. 11-22

The author, co-founder of a small advertising company, retraces all the adventures of her managing activity and expresses the philosophy of her company based on the relevance of the senses and the importance of feelings, in accordance with an attitude women seem to have developed more than men, and wich can make a big difference in the quality of the advertising.

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MODOLIN Cristina, A spot of one's own, pp. 23-25

Motivations, experiences, desires of a young woman still at the beginning of her career in advertising as a junior copywriter. She reflects on the powerful drive needed to enter and stay on in this field, and on her firm belief in independence. She is convinced that things are made easier for her, and that today she can write thanks to all women writers who came before her, and to those who taught her the meaning of freedom.

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BONO Paola, Diatribe, pp. 26-32

Modelled on Jovenal's "Satire I", this bitter divertissement is a furious indictment of advertising and of its pervasive and perverse presence in politics as well as in everyday life.

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TOTA Anna Lisa, Being framed in the media: the role of advertisement in representing Italian women, pp. 33-42

Starting from the idea that media texts through their symbolic representations of gender identities affect, and not simply reflect, women's and men's self-perception is social reality, this article focuses on documenting the extent of this influence by examining the case of advertisements.

On this respect, a central issue concerns the analysis of the encoding and decoding activities in wich textual and social meanings are constructed. Media texts are considered as space and place for "interpretative work". The implied assumption is that a text may become a place for antagonism, as soon as the real reader/spectator encounters the Model Reader/Spectator (or the Implied one) inscribed in the textual strategy.

Following de Laureti's analysis of Eco's theory of reading, culture and media are conceived as technologies of gender. In this perspective, terms as "oppositional gaze", "resisting spectatorship", and "gendering the reader" are declined into the Italian case, in order to highlight the extent to which they are shared among social actors. The implied idea is to analyse the ways in wich different kinds of media texts (such as a TV spot) may affect the collective imaginary.

The main purpose is to illustrate the usefulness of this approach wich constitutes a key to understanding the reciprocal influences between advertisements, public discourse, and self-perception of the social actors in terms of gender. By focusing on four different kinds of frames (i.e. motherhood, career-oriented professional woman, object of sexual desire, medical body), the article outlines some general trends regarding Italian advertisement.

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POLIEDRA

SALLUZZO Cinzia (introduced by PRAVADELLI Veronica), Moving subject: Sally Potter's cinema, pp. 57-67

Analysing Sally Potter's work, the author retraces both the evolution of this important film maker and the changing subjectivity of woman inside contemporary society, from the feminist movement of the 70's up to the present.

In Potter's films women struggle to, and succeed in, defining themselves outside the patriarchal society schemes which had been foisted on them. From the experimental and formal research of her earlier films to the apparently more narrative work of later years, Potter's cinema is read as a coherent though varied investigation of women's subjectivity.

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MARCHETTI Sabrina, Women and Charwomen, pp. 68-98

This article argues that the role of migrant women within the Italian households demonstrates how gender equality is far to come in terms of sharing of parental and domestic duties. The original part of it looks at the relation between the migrant employee and her employer suggesting that a "sexual contract" is at work between the two models of female roles because there is an asymmetrical and interdependent positioning.

Moreover, it is possible to recognize the general dynamics of cultural imperialism to which migrant groups are subjected, and where abjection, as Kristeva defines it, takes place. At the same time, the employer is herself forced to correspond to the traditional standards of "respectability" as illustrated by Mosse.

Finally, the author argues that immigrant women are the ideal subject needed in order to fill the fissures left within the female traditional model by the paradoxes of citizenship, as Boccia calls them. In this view, the employee fills the empty space left by her employer within the household, in both a symbolical and a physical way.

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RILANCI

PANIGHETTI Irene, About In the Wind, pp. 99-103

Mixing thoughts and emotions, the author discusses In the Wind, a previous issue of DWF. The admitted goal is creating a fruitful dialogue with the editorial staff and the readers, in order to reflect on DWF political and cultural work, and to find together forms of communication always in progress.

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