Gender, discourse and ideology in Italian offers a critical outlook on theories about gender, feminism, and ideology. It also sheds light on practical issues, describing how Italian has preserved imbalanced discourses on the role of women.
In the first chapter, Frederica Formato presents Italians’ mainstream view of women, covering the political and mediatic arenas. Chauvinist insults and the focus on domestic chores seem to institutionalise female inferiority and reinforce their subordination to the order named as ‘male as a norm’. The analysis of the Italian media highlights its gendered divide—weekly magazines, for instance, are based on the stereotype of women as those interested in fashion, gossip, show business, and household activities. On television, women are objectified: a tongue-tied presence displaying their bodies as commodities. For the author, such condition is not ‘natural’; instead, it is the product of a sexist and unfair use of language. Starting with Lakoff's distinction of gender and sex, the reader observes how the academy has developed the concept of gender. Recently, the groundbreaking notions of performativity and social constructivism have proposed a brand new perspective on the issue, describing gender as the result of a social performance.
The second chapter is concerned with gender and grammar. The focus lies on two main groups—grammatical and natural gender languages—in which gender can be visible, indexical, or invisible. The author then discusses how Italian—a gendered system with morphemes referring to men and women—is manipulated to reproduce and perpetuate sexist inequalities. Masculine is the norm and feminine, the exception.
The third chapter discusses recommendations for a nonsexist use of Italian, including academic studies, public documents, Alma Sabatini's works, as well as activism aimed at raising awareness in the spheres of politics and social media. In the end, Formato presents comments found online and a survey conducted on the issue.
The fourth chapter analyses women in the public sphere. The world of politics is a gendered space, and the author discusses attacks on female politicians and the use of unmarked masculine forms for women. The fifth chapter is devoted to a brutal femminicidio that gained attention in the news and in politics, exploring the mediatic language used to cover the murder. The tendency is to blame the victim for hurting the murderer's feelings and reduce her description to the role within the relationship, omitting contributions to the academic and professional worlds.
In the last chapter, Formato claims for more initiatives to promote a fairer language and a fairer society. Today's scenario could not be more ambiguous—as new voices emerge to speak up for gender equality, conservative movements also fight to preserve the status quo.
Gender, discourse and ideology in Italian brings forth a theoretical discussion of key concepts, such as gender, ideology, and feminism. It also provides data on how Italians actually respond to gendered language. Formato's analysis instigates our curiosity on how language determines and is determined by gender relations in a given society. Could there be similarities across cultures with similar linguistic systems, such as French, Portuguese, and Italian? To what extent have those similarities been determined by their Latin roots? These matters deserve attention and can be further exploited in future research.
