(DOWNLOAD) "Italy: America's war Bride. How Life Magazine Feminized Italy in the 1950S (Critical Essay)" by Italica # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Italy: America's war Bride. How Life Magazine Feminized Italy in the 1950S (Critical Essay)
- Author : Italica
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 99 KB
Description
The 1950s America took possession of Italy, symbolically, by "taking its women. (1) In the period that followed World War II, America entrapped and metabolized Italy in its sphere of influence through the Marshall flood of material "gifts" (from chocolate to domestic appliances, from cigarettes to Hollywood movies), and at a figurative level, through a host of photographers and journalists who molded Italy at their will. While America attracted Italy to its political and economical orb, the American symbolic imagination shaped a new image of the country that made it suitable for its cultural conquest. It lured Italy with the shining threads of its spider web, and once well encased, it sucked out its distilled image for its domestic public to digest. In this essay I will analyze the way in which American culture made Italy a part of the Western Empire by visually possessing its women in Life Magazine. Issues of nationality and political influence strongly intersect with issues of class and sexuality in a process of "social constructionism" that finds its illustration on the popular mass media. (2) Life Magazine, the hot product of the new mass culture and the most read photo-magazine of the time, is the meeting point of a strange alliance that makes it a revealing mirror of the American Cold War strategy. In fact, while the American ambassador Clare Booth Luce worked in Italy for the supremacy of Western ideals, her husband, the press tycoon Henry Luce, owner of Life, worked on domestic ground to redesign the ideological map of Italy in the context of Pax Americana, and gave it a face in his magazine. Strikingly, this face is the face of a woman. (3) In the magazine, Italy becomes a "feminized country," a country that is led back to submission by stressing its feminine features. America gave Italy food and culture, democracy and new kitchens. As its Pygmalion, it then symbolically transformed it into a beautiful woman in distress, ready to be rescued. This symbolic operation takes a vivid materiality in the magazine's photos, and the Italian woman, the war bride or the diva, becomes the metonym for the entire country. Such a portrait of Italy as a beautiful woman available for possession reminds us of the more violent rape of the Sabines, a foundational myth of the Roman Empire. (4) In the following I will demonstrate a three-fold process of feminization by analyzing Life's Italian women, Italian men, and Italian land.