In 2012, Rashida Manjoo, then the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, visited Italy to ‘verify women's status in the country’ and stated her concern for the high number of feminicides reported in the country (137 women were killed in 2011, 126 in 2012, although no institutionally gathered data exist). Partly in connection to this visit, the year 2012 became ‘sadly known as the year of feminicides’ in Italy; but it also came to represent, as Marina Bettaglio, one of the editors and authors of this impressive collection recounts, ‘a turning point in the way in which the media and public opinion deal with the emergency of violence against women’ (p. 138). Rappresentare la violenza di genere. Sguardi femministi tra critica, attivismo e scrittura discusses the ‘new horizons of visibility’ (‘nuovi orizzonti di visibilità’) (p. 18) that have been arising in Italy in the third millennium. By offering an assessment of what has changed and what still needs to change in the representational practices of gender violence in Italian culture and politics, the volume fills a critical lacuna and makes available to the public a set of essential resources and reflections on today's Italy.

The introduction highlights the importance of a feminist approach that, like other movements against hegemonic practices and biases, aims at combating gender discrimination by rendering visible its systemically violent structure. The editors trace back the increased visibility of gender violence to the recent development of local and global movements such as Ni una di menos in Argentina, Se non ora quando in Italy and #MeToo, and to the increased mediatic attention that the crimes have received. They point out that if on the one hand this attention, in glamorising pain and violence, can sometimes pose ethical issues, on the other hand it is for the first time encompassing not only female subjects but also queer and trans subjects, historically marginalised even within the hierarchies of oppression.

Divided into three sections (Critica, Attivismo and Scrittura), the volume thoughtfully blends different authorial practices as a way out of the compartmentalising tendency of academic writing, in order to acknowledge both the historical importance of activism in Italy and the key role that narrative and storytelling play in cultural change. The essays included also react against a postfeminist framework that, by tying women's bodies to a neoliberal, consumeristic and individualistic ethos, upholds a dangerous naturalisation of gender objectification and exploitation. Indeed, a concern expressed in many contributions (Pickering-Iazzi and Bettaglio among others) focuses on the risk of the spectacularisation of violence and/or of victimhood that is inherent in contemporary media. Visibility itself, far from being uniquely subversive and innovative, ‘can easily turn into a device of control, repression and oppression’ (p. 30). This is visible, for example, in the cinematic tradition: through their analysis of a single movie (Benini) or in overviews of cinema as a privileged ‘locus of repression’ (Zecchi, p. 192, and Manzoli), the essays highlight the powerful naturalising effects of the cinematic medium with representational strategies that obscure the reality of domination.

Together with references to visual language and storytelling, the volume offers evaluations of the ongoing changes within Italian cultural and social life at large – in journalism, with Gi.U.Li.A.'s important work on the language describing femminicidi in media outlets (Gaiaschi), and in social contexts, thanks to initiatives carried out by the centri antiviolenza and via social media campaigns (Eretica, Caterina Peroni). The interviews with Spanish writer and psychoanalyst Lola López Mondéjar and Italian feminist playwright and writer Dacia Maraini, together with the full bibliographic references to a global landscape of antiviolence activism and gender theorisations (from Liz Kelly to Marcela Lagarde, from Suzanna Chàvez to Judith Butler, from Michael Kimmel to Jill Radford and Diana H. Russell) offer an extremely detailed and in-depth assessment of this cultural moment. In addition, the volume does not shy away from the contradictions and debates inherent to this sensitive topic and from the multiplicity of points of view that can and should be brought to the issue (Ross, Simi and Vallorani among others). The variety of the themes covered within the broader topic of gender violence, from the nationalistic aims of ethnic rape (Carotenuto) to the delegitimisation of trans victims of gender violence (Bonali), insists on the necessity of an epistemological and hermeneutical continuum in our approach to gender violence in all forms.

Among the many merits of this original, extraordinarily informative, rich and enjoyable collection is the fact that, by focusing on such a short period of time (the first 17–18 years of the third millennium) and by looking at this context and time-period from different angles (from the founding of Se non ora quando to the signing of the 2011 Istanbul Convention, from the origin of the words femmicidio and femminicidio to the rise of #WeToogether), this volume draws a truly kaleidoscopic map of how representational strategies and decisions are made at the narrative and mediatic level, but also a step-by-step narrative of how they are made to change. That is, how the calls for visibility and accountability, the necessary institutional interventions and data-based research and analyses can have an impact on the way gender violence is seen (or not), and how it is (mis)represented and condemned (or not) in our society. Writing, as I am, as the Legge Zan still awaits to be voted on in the Senate, I am (we are) painfully aware of the importance that every gesture and intervention can have in the necessary fight against the systems of gender oppression.