“Godmothers: Portraits From the Past of Two Distinct Camorra Women”, "Madrinas: retratos narrativos del pasado de dos mujeres distintas de la Camorra "

In the past few years we have seen a significant increase in TV series productions proposing feminine protagonists (Negra and Lagerwey 2017), and, among them, bloodthirsty women committing cruel crimes and ordering massacres. Since traditional gender expectations see “femininity [...] associated with nurturing and caring for others, with emotion, passivity and vulnerability [and] violence and aggression as intrinsic to our conceptualization of masculinity” (Boyle 2005, 95), our theoretical premise is that narratives that portray violent women commit themselves to a troublesome relation with one of the pillars of male domination, that of violence (Bourdieu 2002). We choose to work on La sfida by Francesco Rosi (1958) and Il camorrista by Giuseppe Tornatore (1986) to investigate a sort of Statu Nascenti (Alberoni 1979) of this troublesome relation, since those movies depict - among other male protagonists - two important Camorra ladies. Both are based on actual events, individuals, journalistic and judiciary evidence. The Camorra’s Boss Assunta Maresca, named “Pupetta” (little doll), is the prominent female (anti)heroine of the first movie while Rosetta Cutolo, the Camorra’s Boss Raffaele Cutolo’s, sister is the (anti)heroine of Il Camorrista. At first, we will look at the elements that highlight the “gendered and gendering dimension(s)” (Buonanno 2014) in the representation of the two women. Secondly, we will look for other elements producing such different representations, the origin of which lies in sources such as criminal law, extracts from interrogatories and press articles,