Women, Terrorism, and Trauma in Italian Culture
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Copyrighted Material - 9781137294067 Women, Terrorism, and Trauma in Italian Culture Ruth Glynn Copyrighted Material - 9781137294067 Copyrighted Material - 9781137294067 women, terrorism, and trauma in italian culture Copyright © Ruth Glynn, 2013. All rights reserved. First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978- 1- 137- 29406- 7 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Glynn, Ruth. Women, terrorism, and trauma in Italian culture / Ruth Glynn. p. cm.— (Italian and Italian American studies) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978- 1- 137- 29406- 7 1. Terrorism in mass media. 2. Women terrorists— Italy. 3. Terrorism— Social aspects— Italy. I. Title. P96.T472I845 2013 363.325082'0945— dc23 2012038084 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: February 2013 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyrighted Material - 9781137294067 Copyrighted Material - 9781137294067 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: The anni di piombo, Women, and Trauma 1 1 Approaching Women, Terror, and Trauma in Cultural Perspective 17 2 Press Representations of Italian Women Terrorists 39 3 Feminizing Terror: Pentitismo and the Cinema of Containment 73 4 Writing the Terrorist Self 99 5 Refeminizing the Female Terrorist 127 6 Romancing the Female Terrorist 151 7 Between Myth and Maternity: The Women of the “New Red Brigades” 177 Afterword 205 Notes 211 Bibliography 265 Index 283 Copyrighted Material - 9781137294067 Copyrighted Material - 9781137294067 Copyrighted Material - 9781137294067 Copyrighted Material - 9781137294067 Introduction The anni di piombo, Women, and Trauma n March 2003, a routine inspection of identity papers on a train in Tus- Icany ended in a shoot- out between transport police and members of a terrorist formation known to the Italian public as the “Nuove brigate rosse” [New Red Brigades]. Two people lost their lives in the incident: Emanuele Petri, a local police officer, and Mario Galesi, a member of the terrorist organization. Galesi’s companion, Nadia Lioce, was restrained at the scene and subsequently arrested; soon thereafter, she was unveiled as the leader of the New Red Brigades and the mastermind behind the organization’s killing of Italian government consultants Massimo D’Antona in 1999 and Marco Biagi in 2002. Far from a curiosity, Lioce was but the latest in a long line of Italian women who had dedicated their lives to the political ideals of a proscribed organization and who had taken up arms in pursuit of those ideals. By the time of Lioce’s arrest in 2003, the Italian public was well acquainted with the historical fact (if not always the detail) of women’s involvement in terrorist organizations. The earliest known female terrorist, Margherita Cagol— a founding member of Italy’s most infamous terrorist organization, the Red Brigades (BR), and the first of their number to be killed in action— had attained the status of popular icon or cult figure, admired, romanticized, and mourned by a certain section of the left- wing public.1 More recently, a number of prominent former members of terrorist organizations— among them Adriana Faranda, Barbara Balzerani, and Susanna Ronconi on the political Left, and Francesca Mambro on the Right— have enjoyed a rela- tively high public profile, not only for their involvement in the crimes of the period of Italian history known as the anni di piombo (“years of lead,” c. 1969– 83), but also for their appearances on television shows dedicated to those years and for the various publications in which they recount their experience of armed struggle.2 Copyrighted Material - 9781137294067 Copyrighted Material - 9781137294067 2 WOMEN, TERRORISM, AND TRAUMA IN ITALIAN CULTURE As reactions to Nadia Lioce’s presence at the helm of the New Red Bri- gades and as the disproportionate attention granted female terrorists in the corpus of cultural production dedicated to the anni di piombo serve to demonstrate, the phenomenon of female perpetration exerts a particu- larly strong traumatic valence in Italian culture. Throughout the history of Italian terrorism and its representation, individual women and the female component of terrorist organizations as a whole have been disproportion- ately subject to intense public debate, media scrutiny, and cultural represen- tation. Whether vilified, belittled, or spectacularized, women’s involvement in acts of political aggression has been viewed very differently than that of men and subjected to far more anxious— and often idiosyncratic— attempts to explain it. Consequently, women’s participation in Italian ter- rorist organizations has long been the subject of statistical, historical, and psychological studies, as well as of journalistic review. Yet, despite the prev- alence of representations dedicated to women’s participation in terrorism and the influence such representations tend to have on public perceptions of political violence, cultural production has been sorely neglected in the scholarly literature treating the contribution of women to the violence of the anni di piombo. The critical corpus constitutes only a handful of books focused on press representations of women terrorists (especially Mar- gherita Cagol) and a small number of widely dispersed articles addressing writings by women terrorists or cinematic representations of women asso- ciated with terrorism.3 This book is intended to rectify the situation and to bridge a gulf in the scholarly literature. It provides the first sustained analysis of cultural representations of women and terrorism in Italy and brings to the study of the anni di piombo a unique focus on the traumatic import of women’s participation in political violence. It advances a new, gendered critique of trauma theory and demonstrates how Italian cultural production— which persistently construes women’s participation as an intensification or escalation of the threat posed by domestic terrorism— may be read as symptomatic of the collective and cultural trauma associated with female- gendered violence. Central to the argument is a recognition that the trauma of the female terrorist is closely bound up with the challenge she poses to the established social order and to the ideological premises underlying the gendered nature of social organization. However, before elucidating the specific mechanisms at work in cultural representations of women’s participation in political violence, it is pertinent to provide a brief over- view of the events of the anni di piombo and to clarify what is— and is not— intended by the use of the terms terrorism and anni di piombo. Copyrighted Material - 9781137294067 Copyrighted Material - 9781137294067 THE ANNI DI PIOMBO, WOMEN, AND TRAUMA 3 Events and Problems of Terminology Between 1969 and 1983, a total of 697 different entities claimed responsi- bility for more than 14,000 terrorist attacks in Italy, resulting in 374 deaths and more than 1,170 injuries.4 As recounted in the numerous studies dedicated to the phenomenon, violence was employed by extremists on both sides of the political divide, with the Red Brigades and Prima Linea leading the attack on the Left, and Avanguardia Nazionale, Ordine Nuovo, and the Nuclei Armati Proletari the most prominent groups on the Right.5 The earlier years of the period (1969– 74) saw the emergence of political violence primarily as a practice of the Far Right, characterized predomi- nantly by indiscriminate bombings of public spaces tactically designed to cause maximum injury and panic. The bombings— the most devastat- ing of which took place in Milan’s Piazza Fontana (1969), Brescia’s Piazza della Loggia (1974), the Italicus train (1974), and Bologna’s railway station (1980)— formed part of a right- wing “strategy of tension,” which sought to pass off acts of public violence as the work of left- wing activists in order to pave the way for the imposition of military rule. In that strategy of tension, the Italian state itself was implicated, with the highest orders of the secret service found to be involved in orchestrating right- wing atrocities.6 From the mid- 1970s on, Italy’s Far Left responded to what was viewed as state- sponsored violence with violent tactics of its own, targeting for “pro- letarian trials,” beatings, kidnappings, and shootings individual represen- tatives of their capitalist adversaries: the large industrial corporations, the security forces, the procapitalist mainstream media, and the Italian state.7 The levels of violence gradually intensified, culminating in the watershed episode of left- wing political violence: the Red Brigades’ 1978 kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, party president of the ruling Christian Demo- crats, and the annihilation of his security team. Harrowing though it was, this episode signaled the beginning of the end for left- wing terrorism. The murder of the hostage led to an internal split within the Red Brigades, to the alienation of their passive supporters, and to the introduction of a series of policing and legislative initiatives that would prove extremely successful in containing the threat of political violence. A series of mass arrests in the years 1981– 83 effectively brought a halt to the reign of terror. In the overview of events presented previously, and throughout this book, I make liberal use of the terms terrorism and terrorist. It should be noted, however, that there is no universally agreed understanding— legal or academic— of what terrorism is.8 At a legal level, governments, state bod- ies, and international agencies employ a range of diverse and often impre- cise definitions of terrorism.