- The Crisis-Woman: Body Politics and the Modern Woman in Fascist Italy by Natasha V. Chang
The debate about Fascist gender politics has fascinated many scholars in the field of History, Gender Studies, and Italian Studies. Those researchers will find an important addition to the scholarship in the field in Natasha V. Chang's book The Crisis-Woman: Body Politics and the Modern Woman in Fascist Italy. The figure of the donna-crisi is, according to Chang, a foundational ideological construct of the Fascist regime in its process of inscribing discursive power onto women's bodies. In the interaction between modernity and gendered bodies, the donna-crisi—a thin, fashionable, and neurotic type—becomes the catalyst for anxieties about Italy's demographic future and the changes in social roles of Italian urban women.
The crisis-woman acts also as the opposite of the Fascist gendered models of the donna-madre (woman-mother) and the New Woman. The donna-crisi becomes the phantasmatic abject entity opposite of the Fascist Woman's body, the latter made for reproduction and thus healthy, athletic, or curvaceous and unproblematic.
In this volume, Chang explores the context of the scholarship on Fascism and women's bodies under the regime including works by Victoria De Grazia, Robin Pickering-Iazzi, Elisabetta Mondello, and Stephen Gundle. Moving confidently among the contributions of her colleagues, Chang points out how they only tangentially touched upon the figure of the crisis-woman. Further, Chang underlines how the donna-crisi becomes a specimen of what Slavoj Zizek would call an ideological fantasy of the regime. The crisis-woman appears to be the embodiment of the notion of crisis, provoked by Mussolini and his associates as a validation of the process of capillary Fascistization of the public and private spheres in Italy.
The book demonstrates through case studies—in the three fields of women's fashion magazines, scientific writings as well as popular scientific journalism, and finally satirical cartoons—how the biopower discourse of the regime has been inscribed on the female body, following what can be described as a Foucauldian paradigm. Chang's argument additionally relies on Judith Butler's notion of bodies that matter versus bodies that are abject and projected outside of the domain of intelligibility as this pertains to the fate of the donna-crisi.
The first chapter consists of the examination of women's fashion press, and its Fascist, regulatory agenda, policing women's bodies and transforming them into sites of social anxieties and ideological battles. The second chapter concerns scientific discourse, characterized by a Lombrosian imprinting that reads in the body the marks of social deviation, and the donna-crisi as the abject female body par excellence. Beyond official science, [End Page 113] popular scientific journalism attacks the donna-crisi even more, assigning her body to the realm of physical pathology and moral decadence. The third chapter deals with the representation of the donna-crisi in the satirical press, identifying in this particular medium a powerful and popular propaganda tool. There the thin body of the donna-crisi becomes a racial threat and a model of degenerate female sexuality. Chang claims that the satirical press is also sometimes the site of subversive laughter, mostly when the satirical cartoons' target becomes the donna-crisi's husband.
The fourth chapter explores the concept of the donna-crisi as an ideological fantasy: according to the concept elaborated by Slavoj Zizek, the donnacrisi in the Fascist period embodies "pure difference," "radical otherness," a "repository for negativity." She is a figure of condensation of different Fascist anxieties: from bourgeois decadence to promiscuity, revolutionized gender roles, social upheaval, mass culture, urbanization, racial contamination, and national pathologization and collapse. She is a figure of ideological consolidation of the regime as well as the expression of its ideological weakness.
Clarity and focus are the quintessential characteristics of this volume, together with powerful evidence produced by Chang's accurate analysis and methodologically sound research accompanied by a set of revealing illustrations that...