Women, Terror and Trauma in Italian Culture

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Research Context:My research examines cultural representations of women, terror, and trauma in the context of domestic terrorism in Italy in the 1970s and beyond. It explores the ways in which Italian culture engages with and remembers the prolonged political violence and terrorism of the period known as the anni di piombo ('years of lead', c. 1969-83). Its primary focus is on the ways in which women's active participation in political violence and terrorism in that period is articulated as collective and cultural trauma in memoir, fiction and film. The key issues I have explored cluster around the particular kind of trauma generated by female violence. I analyse how representations of women terrorists in the popular media and film may be read as trauma narratives, and compare these with recently published memoirs by female ex-terrorists, focusing on how they themselves articulate as trauma their own participation in political violence in the recent past.Aims and Objectives:The work I carried out while on research leave has advanced the first two sections of my longer-term research project, focusing on cinematic representations of women terrorists and the comparison between those cinematic representations and the self-representations by women terrorists in their recently published memoirs.This has involved:1. Carrying out primary research into cinematic representations of female terrorists, including a study of films held at theCinecitta studios in Rome. It resulted in a conference presentation and the subsequent publication of an article:-'Terrorism, a Female Malady'Submitted in August 2006 to Ruth Glynn, Giancarlo Lombardi and Alan O'Leary, Terrorism, Italian Style: CinematicRepresentations of Political Violence in Italy (2008).2. Writing up research already completed in two further articles:-'Through the Lens of Trauma: The Figure of the Female Terrorist in II prigioniero and Buongiorno, notte'Submission in October 2006 to Pierpaolo Antonello and Alan O'Leary (ed.), Imagining Terrorism: The Rhetoric andRepresentation of Political Violence in Italy, 1969-2005 (Legenda, 2008)-'Writing the Terrorist Self: Subalternity and the Female Perpetrator'Submission forthcoming in April 2007 to the journal, Modern Italy.3. Presenting four further, related conference papers.4. Co-organising an interdisciplinary conference in November 2006.Potential Applications and Benefits:My research will contribute significantly to understanding how Italian culture may be read as attempting to work through the collective trauma generated by the prolonged exposure to political violence in the anni di piombo. It is unique in providing a sustained reading of the anni di piombo as cultural trauma and in bringing to the contemporary re-examination of the period a focus on the particular trauma inflicted by women's participation in political violence and terrorism. In asking such questions as why the figure of the female terrorist has gained a heightened profile in recent culture and how the 'feminisation' of the terrorist figure impacts on the collective 'working through' of the traumatic past, my work will contribute not only to an understanding of the processes inherent in the Italian cultural memory of the anni di piombo and current explorations into around cinematic representations of violent women, but also to trauma studies: in this latter field, it will expose the implicit but unarticulated ideas about gender and violence within trauma theory and call for a more gender-sensitive approach to the trauma of political violence.