Le figure femminili all'ombra di Cosa Nostra: la rappresentazione della donna mafiosa siciliana sulla stampa italiana del secondo dopoguerra

This thesis investigates the representation of Sicilian mafia women on the Italian press after the second postwar, in particular by examining three Italian newspapers, Il Corriere della Sera, L’Ora and Il Giornale di Sicilia. The focus is on the 1963 – 1983 twenty-year period, after which there has been a big change in the world of Sicilian crime organization with the phenomenon of pentitismo that changes a lot of thing in the whole universe of mafia. In this research there are two aspects very different but very central at the same time. On one hand the careful counting of quoted newspapers and the filing of the articles about general mafia and mafia women, which rendered a whole database about the interest for these woman figures founded in print, in a historical period never analyzed from this point of view; on the other hand the interpretation of these articles and the different representation forms. The founded material was compared with the cultural Italian history of that period to understand if there was a difference between general woman perception and that of mafia woman and if there was also an iconographic prototype of southern woman which it is possible to apply on photographs and descriptions. In fact the most important result of the thesis is to underline that, in front of a woman who belongs to mafia context, the Italia press represented the female gender as first and the mafia gender as the second one.