Introduction

Abstract

Italian women writers, filmmakers, and performers working from the 1950s to the turn of the twenty-first century present a multi-generic response to the place of womanhood in Italy. They confront the discrepancy between the definitions of womanhood developing from traditional strictures governing femininity and the promise of new possibilities arising after World War II and beyond. In charting a map of Italian female identity, these artists challenge patriarchal tradition, but also investigate salient moments spanning from the postwar hope of women’s engagement in sociopolitical revision to the promise of evolving social elasticity in the early twenty-first century. The results are representations of female identity that include critical readings of the female self in cultural production and social discourse to appropriations of the very means of representation.