Giorgia Meloni, first president of the Council of Ministers, broke the glass ceiling which limited the role of women in Italian politics. But in the daily lives of other women, in their perspectives, what has changed? To analyze the facts and words of the majority that has governed Italy since 22 October 2022 is the journalist Caterina D’Ambrosio in ‘Feminine sovereignist – Giorgia Meloni and the body of women’in bookstores since 2 December (Editions Tab10 euros, 102 pages).
“The book was born from the need to understand how women’s bodies have become to all intents and purposes a terrain of political conflict – states the author -, a small toolbox to understand, beyond the slogans, the transformations of the world in which Italian women try to movebuild and assert oneself”, states the author. D’Ambrosio has written about culture, politics and economics for print media, magazines and the web. Author for Rai and Mediaset, she has collaborated with l’Unità, l’Unione Sarda, Fortune Italia, Il Sole 24 Ore, Treccani, VanityFair.it, Radio Popolare, RDS and Rai Radio2. For some years she has been dealing with political communication.
“These pages – claims D’Ambrosio in the introduction – photograph the last few months, without make-up or filters. On the one hand, the measures of the Meloni government, on the other, the rhetoric that justifies them. A rhetoric that obsessively returns to the female body, transforming it into political and symbolic terrain. It is a proven strategy, also common elsewhere in Europe: talking about women to redefine their boundaries, to put them “in their place”. The result is clear. A narrative that relocates them as second-class citizens, far from the goals reserved for “males” and trapped in the old patterns of a patriarchy that, despite everything, does not let go.”