![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
Designed to present a critical analysis of the memorial landscapes composed on facebook sites to commemorate female martyrs of justice in the Sicilian antimafia movement, this exploratory study examines the case of magistrate and antimafia activist, Francesca Morvillo. I argue that while Morvillo’s facebook site works simultaneously as an archive of feelings and a public pedagogical project that infuses documentary records of the post-1980’s decades of antimafia activity with affect, her facebook site eventually overshadows her memory in much the same way she is overshadowed in more mainstream antimafia public cultures. Thus, I suggest that Morvillo’s facebook can also be read as a site of struggle that displaces her memory with iconic images of antimafia history that commemorate masculine histories and relegate her to a figure who lacks political significance worthy of remembering. How, I ask, does Morvillo’s facebook site — this archive of feelings — articulate particular affective investments that resonate to the common, everyday understanding of invisible, forgotten figures and the ways in which discourses of memory and the memorable are taught? The displacements of her memory pose specific challenges to sustaining Morvillo’s legacy and raise important questions in the post-feminist moment about what, in 1990, Teresa De Lauretis described as the paradox of the ‘non-being of a woman’. This paradox serves as my point of departure for considering the absence of Morvillo’s memory in the public imaginary specifically and the implications this absence has for imagining a feminist antimafia consciousness attached to ideals of self-sacrifice and martyrdom more generally.
Notes
1 Alexander Stille, Excellent Cadavers (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 354.
2 According to Stille, the most thorough reconstruction of this assassination is presented in the documents filed by the Procura distrettuale anti-mafia of Caltanisetta: Stille, p. 440, n. 36.
3 The ‘Women of the Sheets’ and ‘Women of the Fast’ were formed as Sicilian women’s collectives who fasted soon after the deaths of Morvillo, Falcone, and Borsellino in order to generate critical public discussion about the mafia. For an astute analysis of how women and other marginalized groups in Sicily established public space to articulate half-spoken traumas that were censored by sovereign powers, see Valeria Fabj, ‘Private Symbols as Vehicles for a Public Voice: “Women of the Fast Reject the Mafia”’, Global Media Journal, 8.15 (2009), 1–22.
4 For an extensive analysis of the role of women in the mafia and antimafia movements, see the work of Robin Pickering-Iazzi. Many of the points I make are developed based on Pickering-Iazzi’s scholarship, most especially, ‘(En)gendering Testimonial Bodies of Evidence and Italian Antimafia Culture: Rita Atria’, Italian Culture, 28.1 (2010), 21–37, and Politics of the Visible: Writing Women, Culture and Fascism (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
5 Deborah Puccio-Den, ‘The Sicilian Mafia: Transformation to a Global Evil’, Etnografica, 12 (2008), 377–86. Peter Schneider and Jane Schneider offer an extensive historical and anthropological analysis of the anti-Mafia movements at work in Sicily since the nineteenth century in Reversible Destinies: Mafia, Antimafia and the Struggle for Palermo (Berkley: University of California Press, 2003).
6 I want to thank my colleague Amy Boylan for directing me to the Francesca Morvillo facebook site and for her astute guidance through the civic projects and material culture used to promote antimafia ideals.
7 Personal correspondence with Gargioni, 13 March 2012.
8 Henry Giroux, ‘Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Neo-Liberalism: Making the Political More Pedagogical’, Policy Futures in Education, 2 (2004), 494–503 (p. 494).
9 Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. by Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).
10 Solange Guenoun, James H. Kavanagh, and Roxanne Lapidis, ‘Jacques Rancière: Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Democratic Disagreement’, SubStance, 29 (2000), 3–24.
11 Maria- Laure Ryan. Avatars of Story (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
12 Listed among the most widely read antimafia blogs and facebook sites are Ammazzateci Tutti (http://www.ammazzatecitutti.org), Clip (http://clipsicillia.blogspot.com), Addiopizzo (http://www.addiopizzo.org), and Corleone Dialogos (http://it-it.facebook.com/corleonedialogos).
13 For a discussion of feminist public pedagogies and their impact on public spheres, see Carmen Luke, Feminisms and Pedagogies of Everyday Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).
14 See Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. by Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007), p. 514.
15 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. by Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
16 Ewa Plonowska Ziarek offers an incisive analysis of the neologism ‘dissensus’ and the ways in which racial and sexual differences play out in the public sphere when persons engage in what she describes, following Levinas, as a ‘transformative praxis motivated by an obligation for the Other’: An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 90.
17 Ziarek discusses whether or not the wounded, expendable, and endangered body (Agamben’s ‘bare life’) can, after being stripped of political significance, develop the capacity to effectively take part in emancipatory movements: Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, ‘Bare Life On Strike: Notes on the Biopolitics of Race and Gender’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 107 (2008), 89–105.
18 Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 268.
19 Cvetkovich, p. 268
20 Again, for an extensive analysis of women and the antimafia public imaginary, see Robin Pickering-Iazzi’s ‘(En)gendering Testimonial Bodies of Evidence and Italian Antimafia Culture: Rita Atria’, Italian Culture, 28 (2010), 21–37.
21 In the context of this project, the concept of ‘civil society’ extends beyond the borders of western politics in a national context to include global landscapes and political practices that derive from non-western traditions. My interest is in exploring the ways in which the antimafia movement works to enhance public participation, consultation, transparency, and accountability within Italy as well as the influence this project has on international movements working to fight transnational organized crime.
22 Teresa De Lauretis, ‘Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness’, Feminist Studies, 16.1 (1990), 115–50 (p. 115).
23 See Pickering-Iazzi (2010), p. 102.
24 Personal correspondence, 13 March 2012.
25 This procession is named after a red diary that belonged to Borsellino and disappeared after his murder. It is believed to have been stolen at the time of his death because it held important information about negotiations between the Italian state and the mafia.
26 Robin Pickering-Iazzi, ‘The Politics of Gender and Genre in Italian Women’s Autobiography of the Interwar Years’, Italica, 71 (1994), 176–97.
27 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Stephen Rendall (San Diego: University of California Press, 2001), p. 125.
28 Leoluca Orlando, Fighting the Mafia and Renewing Sicilian Culture (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001), p. 32.
29 Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, ‘The Hatred of Public Schooling: The School as the Mark of Democracy’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42 (2010), 666–82 (p. 512).
30 See Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and Masschelein and Simons, ‘The Hatred of Public Schooling’.
31 Puccio-Den, p. 380.
32 Renate Siebert, Secrets of Life and Death: Women and the Mafia (New York: Verso Press, 1996).
33 De Lauretis, p. 115.
34 Quoted in De Lauretis, p. 116.
35 De Lauretis, p. 127.
36 De Lauretis, p. 138.
37 Puccio-Den, p. 377.