Masculinity and Italian Cinema: Sexual Politics, Social Conflict and Male Crisis in the 1970s
Sergio Rigoletto
Abstract
Italian cinema has traditionally used the trope of an inadequate man in crisis to reflect on the country’s many social and political upheavals. Masculinity and Italian Cinema takes the 1970s as an especially instructive period for rethinking the concept of male crisis in Italian cinema. The 1970s were a decade of innovation and challenging work for Italian cinema, one that was marked by radicalism and heated debates about the function of cinema as a political medium and as a mass cultural phenomenon. This book shows that these were years in which a wide-ranging redefinition of masculinity took ... More
Italian cinema has traditionally used the trope of an inadequate man in crisis to reflect on the country’s many social and political upheavals. Masculinity and Italian Cinema takes the 1970s as an especially instructive period for rethinking the concept of male crisis in Italian cinema. The 1970s were a decade of innovation and challenging work for Italian cinema, one that was marked by radicalism and heated debates about the function of cinema as a political medium and as a mass cultural phenomenon. This book shows that these were years in which a wide-ranging redefinition of masculinity took place. The book discusses how masculinity functioned in several films of the 1970s as a charged allegory for the many socio-political lacerations of the Italian nation, and as a site of conflict and radical interrogation of ideas about gender and sexuality.
Keywords:
Masculinity,
Italian,
Sexuality,
Crisis,
1968,
Feminism,
Queer,
Gay
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780748654543 |
Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: May 2015 |
DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748654543.001.0001 |