Between disrepute and exoticism. The Yugoslav female partisans in the Italian nationalist press after World War II

Abstract

The article aims to describe the imagery of disrepute against the female partisans of the Yugoslavian National Liberation Army in the Italian nationalist cultural production after the end of World War II. Italian nationalist contexts always represented the Yugoslavian female partisans through racist and sexist depictions, for the latter were active and decision-capable members of an institution which gave credit to women as political, cultural and social subjects. Furthermore, due to its cultural and political characterization, the Yugoslav partisan institution had been seen by an often post-fascist media production as a foe. A visible framework of exoticist dialectics of sexual attraction/social repulsion can also be observed in the analysis. Among the bibliographic sources, we will analyse Primavera a Trieste (Quarantotti Gambini,1985), one of the first mass diffusion works on the Triestine issue, and Fasti e nefasti della quarantena titina a Trieste (Holzer, 1946). Among the hemerographic sources, we will work on articles from Il Grido dell'Istria (the weekly newspaper of the Istrian CLN exiled in Trieste) and the Triestine DC chapter's newspaper La Voce Libera.