Expository Writing Program

In this article, I examine the codification of an Italian work-related illness caused by mobbing, a type of psychological harassment that emerged at the moment neoliberal policies transformed Italy's historically protectionist labor market. I trace how the medicalization of mobbing has expanded workers’ access to compensation, resources, and discursive tools for criticizing neoliberal labor conditions, even as it has produced new structures of surveillance. I unravel the neoliberal politics of a state that protects workers’ health yet governs worker–citizens through an apparatus of medical experts. I find that workers’ labor problems are experienced and managed as bodily problems in ways important to remaking Italian citizenship. [neoliberalism, state, labor, biopolitics, citizenship, bodies, Italy]

ABSTRACT  In Italy, the term precarizzazione (precarious-ization) refers to the process of implementing neoliberal policies to transition toward a semipermanent and privatized labor regime but also to the normalization of psychic uncertainty and hypervigilance of worker-citizens. In this article, I examine “precarious workers” and a psychological harassment called “mobbing,” specifically, and suggest that these practices of labor exclusion of a transitional work regime produce emergent subjectivities through an analytics of anticipation. I illustrate the social, political, and psychic effects of imagining neoliberalism, as Italians do in this context, not as complete but, rather, as a metadiscursive object of emotionally charged apprehension and anticipation.

University commencement rituals inhabit Padua's urban landscape, centering on the graduate's reading from the papiro, or scroll, in front of friends and family. Scrolls include hypersexualized images of graduates and rhymed poems that recount their lives, particularly sexually explicit moments. I analyze graduation scrolls in both as a ritual and literacy shaping and shaped by gender and classed identities and understandings. How does this reading evoke various linguistic ideologies as scrolls are written in standard Italian, the regional Veneto dialect and English? I interrogate how this linguistic practice both challenges and reinforces existing understandings of gender, sex and class. I also focus on how the actions of graduates during the ritual, and the visual images on scrolls, confirm, and sometimes contradict, the written narrative. After an introduction to the history of scrolls in Padua, I analyze one man's scroll with specific attention to embedded voices and code-switching between Veneto dialect and standardized Italian. Together with ethnographic details, close linguistic analysis, and a variety of theoretical insights, I undertake an analysis of this unique graduation ritual, carefully examining debasement, parody, and the reconstitution of social hierarchies.

Questo Forum raccoglie brevi interventi di antropologi che con ruoli diversi lavorano in differenti contesti universitari, allo scopo di riflettere su recenti esperienze di riforme neoliberiste del sistema pubblico dell'istruzione superiore. I contributi esplorano processi di neoliberalizzazione dell'universita e cambiamenti istituzionali in corso in Australia e Nuova Zelanda, Romania, Danimarca, Grecia, Finlandia, Messico, Stati Uniti, Olanda, Spagna, Canada e Regno Unito. L'obiettivo e quello di costruire una piattaforma che possa ospitare riflessioni critiche sulle trasformazioni attuali dell'accademia e delle relative implicazioni per il futuro dell'antropologia. Auspichiamo che il Forum serva anche a indurre i colleghi alle prese con le conseguenze del vigente regime di austerita a formare una coalizione in favore di una idea di universita diversa da quella oggi dominante. Contributi di Cris Shore & Susan Wright, Vintilă Mihăilescu, Sarah F. Green, Gabriela ...

View related articles View Crossmark data South Africa or Germany after the Second World War? Moreover, it is problematic when the author refers to state crime in Italy where 'the law has played a constitutive role in crimes against humanity' (pp.8-9), or refers to Mafia criminality in terms of 'state-sanctioned terror' (p.131). Mourning and reconciliation are central themes in the theory of transitional justice, and are recurrent themes throughout the book. Yet, the theoretical framework hinders the author from considering alternative feelings, such as rage, indifference or fear, which are relevant in the Sicilian context as promoters or obstacles to value change. Moreover, to what extent are Sicilians 'mourning' and in need of reconciliation with their Mafia perpetrators? Research methods, which are scarcely described, are another weak point. How will theory be used? How were the interviewees selected? What is the empirical support for the conclusions? The author explains that she has used 'a type of chiaroscuro technique to portray figures' (p.137). What does that mean more concretely? References to existing anti-Mafia research are also missing in some chapters. For example, the chapter dedicated to female martyrs ignores existing research, which could have helped the author to relate the chapter to a broader theoretical and empirical context. Addiopizzo's story is documented in other scholarly work and the chapter does not add any further knowledge. The interviews with activists are biased, and the author does not address the limited success of the initiative in certain areas, sectors and social strata. In spite of these reservations, the author has written a rich and comprehensive book that consists of a selection of interesting narratives of non-violent civic resistance to the Mafia in Sicily. The book is probably written more for scholars in public education than researchers on organized crime and anti-Mafia. It provides some interesting examples of public pedagogy and its role in democratic societies, and may serve as a first introduction to readers who are unfamiliar with the civic anti-Mafia movement in southern Italy in general and in Sicily in particular.

Charles Worth, founder of the modern couture system of fashion production, scandalized his contemporaries with his incursion into the sphere of women’s dress. The satirical, hostile journalistic accounts of Worth, from his rise to fame in the 1860s through his death in 1895, suggest that “the great man-milliner” escalated Victorian anxieties about gender and value. Simultaneously, the memoirs of Worth’s fans reveal the genesis of a species of cross-gender relationship between designer and clients that is chaste but enamored, controlling but also collaborative. Reading across these opposing perspectives, I argue that Worth embodies a queer Victorian masculinity based not in sexual preference or effeminacy but in social and material relations to women, and that the opulence of his work transcends the boundary between fashion and art.

In this essay, I juxtapose coverage of the 1870 trial of Ernest “Stella” Boulton and Frederick “Fanny” Park, drag performers who were charged with sodomy, with contemporaneous fashion and anti-fashion media. This was a dramatically transitional moment in the histories of both fashion and sexuality. The classification of homosexuality was shifting, in Foucault’s terms, from sodomy-as-act to sodomite-as-identity. Meanwhile, an older model of elite and localized access to high fashion was being superseded by an expanded and globalizing system of distribution and consumption; furthermore, at this precise moment, the enormous circularity of the mid-Victorian “crinoline” silhouette was giving way to the riotously ornamented, less readably feminine, and arguably much queerer new look of the “bustle” line. Delving into the archives of both fashion reporting and sex-policing, I demonstrate that the multivalent strains of extremity characteristic of mid-Victorian dress — with its increasingly outré objects of desire, languages of description, and routes of circulation — became foundational sites for the construction and the transmission of extravagantly styled queer personae.