Gender violence and sexism in Italy. Norms, control and sexuality

Abstract

Gender-based violence and prostitution are social facts that historically in

the way they are represented and socially constructed processes produce

ethnicization, essentialism, culturalization of female bodies and deviant than

the heterosexual norm. In this paper we compare two different waves

discourse, on the one hand that securitarian (2007-2009) that has seen

violence and prostitution both devices to agitate social alarms, justify

repressive measures, reproduce rhetorical securitarian and at the same time

reaffirm social gender roles essentialized, on the other the next (2010-2012),

in which violence against women, in part thanks to the power of word of

Italian feminists, yes is given in the home, but how did outstanding and

without questioning the state of relations gender in our society, while the

sex scandals linked to Berlusconi and the spread of a discursive order

distorts neo-moralistic terms such as prostitution, violence, selfdetermination

and freedom. These two cases are epiphenomena of a trend

that sees women's bodies and their sexuality object of devices and discursive

orders useful to reaffirm the heterosexual norm, asymmetrical gender

relations, and more generally a given social order based on the control of

body.