Visual infrapolitics: gender performance in the Italian entertainment industry, between secret visuality and postfeminist resistance

Abstract

This article discusses postfeminist practices of resistance within contemporary visuality. Drawing on concepts used in visual and cultural studies, it describes and interprets the gender performance through which Giulia, avelina,challenges her own sexual and economic domination in her everyday affective labour and work. For this purpose, I report Giulia’s account of herself, resulting from a series of interviews conducted in 2014 and 2015. In the first part of the article, I will describe Giulia’s gendered etiquette, i.e. a complex of corporeal and behavioural prescriptions. Next, I will describe a set of acts of resistance performed by Giulia in her everyday social interactions in order to protect herself, to speak out and to build alliances against the violence implied by the stigma attached to thevelina’s gender/class norm. Finally, I will apply the concept of visual infrapolitics to the open field of visual practices through which a female worker of the entertainment industry criticises the gender-based violence implied by her labour form and by the stigma attached to her gender etiquette. I argue that such a wide field of practices pertains to a postfeminist sensibility and materialises the possibility for collective acts of resistance.

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“…While Scott's work originally considered such power relations in an agrarian setting in South East Asia, he subsequently expanded this analysis to modern and urban settings. Other scholars have built on this framework to apply infrapolitics to topics as diverse as the gendered aspects of the Italian entertainment industry (Martinez Tagliavia, 2018), a study of an Aboriginal-owned heritage tourism company (Darby, 2008), the working conditions of casino cocktail waitresses in the U.S. (De Volo, 2003), the place of humour and jokes as infrapolitics in Nigeria (Obadare, 2009), scatological tropes on China's internet (Yang et al, 2015), urban gardening as a form of resistance (Baudry, 2012), protest tactics in contemporary Russia (Fr€ ohlich and Jacobsson, 2019).…”