Gender Roles in Neorealism’s Baraccati and National Identity in Post-war Italy

Abstract

Unauthorised immigration has emerged as a generalised fact in all Western economies in the post-Second World War era. The paper, drawing upon the situation of the so-called baraccati in post-WWII Rome as presented in Vittorio De Sica’s movie The roof (1956), aims to present how migrant incorporation triggers processes of place-making which open up new social and conceptual spaces in the city. Τhe cinematic representations of working women in the Italian Neorealist cinema reveal filmmakers’ perception of a newly conceptualized Italy. Τhe roles of baraccati and women in Italian Neorealist cinema function as devices of reconceptualization of Italy’s identity, providing a fertile terrain in order to reflect on the intersections between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies. Taking as a starting point the fact that domesticity is a construction of the nineteenth century, the main objective is to shed light on how migration challenges the concepts of user, domesticity and citizenship. Saskia Sassen’s understanding of immigration as “a process constituted by human beings with will and agency, with multiple identities and life trajectories beyond the fact of being seen, defined and categorised as immigrants for the purposes of the receiving polity, economy and society” is useful in order to better grasp the impact of migration on the status of public space, leading to a more open conception of it and to the reconceptualization of the notion of place beyond traditional definitions, while challenging the boundaries between what is public, communal and domestic. Migrant incorporation triggers processes of place-making which open up new social and conceptual spaces in the city. Over the last four decades, there is a changing paradigm in migration studies that are gradually paying more and more attention to the gender composition of the migration streams. This trend of studying conjointly gender and migration phenomena becomes more and more dominant. Special attention is paid to methods of gender and migration scholarship drawing on social science approaches, treating gender as an institutional part of immigration studies and establishing legitimacy for gender in immigration studies. By the 1990s, research started emphasizing migration as a gendered process, promoting gender as a dynamic and constitutive element of migration and immigrant integration. This paper seeks to present how these intersections between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies can provide a new reading of the concepts of domesticity, citizenship and displacement in Italian Neorealist cinema.