ITACOMICS · From Dale Arden to Valentina. Americanisation and gender representation in Italian comics, 1934-1965.
Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2023-09-11 → 2025-09-10
- EU contribution
- €175,920
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
From Dale Arden to Valentina. Americanisation and gender representation in Italian comics, 1934-1965.
Comics are a powerful medium and expression of popular culture, capable of shaping and reflecting perceptions of identity and society. In 1930s Italy, American adventure comics entered the national publishing landscape and quickly became part of Italian popular culture, as well as a good consumed daily. With their widespread distribution and appeal to younger audiences, they played a key role in introducing American values, aesthetics, and gender roles into Italian culture — even under the Fascist regime, which aimed to mould Italian society according to its own values. The ITACOMICS project investigates how Italian comics evolved from 1934, when American comics were first introduced, through to 1965, when Valentina, a groundbreaking female-centred comic, was launched. By analysing key examples of comics from the Fascist period, the post-war years, and the era of the economic boom, the project explores how gender norms and transnational cultural exchange were negotiated and reshaped through visual storytelling. ITACOMICS offers an innovative cultural history of Italian comics, showing how American influences were not passively received but creatively adapted within a changing political and social context. The project highlights how comics reflected broader transformations — from dictatorship to democracy — and how they contributed to constructing ideas of masculinity, femininity, and national identity. This research provides new insight into the cross-cultural nature of comics and sheds light on a crucial yet understudied aspect of modern Italian culture. By reassessing the impact of American models and the specificity of the Italian context, ITACOMICS challenges dominant Anglophone perspectives and enriches our understanding of transnational media flows in the 20th century.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Comics are a powerful means through which American values reached Italy in the 1930s and became part of its culture. With their formative potential influence on younger readers and wide distribution, comics provide a unique line of enquiry for exploring cultural changes, as both a reflection of and a contributor to such changes. My project explores the evolution of Italian comics from the 1930s to the 1960s, focusing on gender discourse and transnational exchange to offer a novel perspective on modern Italianculture. By examining comics in the Fascist era, the post-war era, and the economic boom era, ITACOMICS examines the impact of the American model in shaping Italian comics and assesses their impact in gender representation while taking into account the sociopolitical context which influenced comics production. This approach will show how such cultural dialogue produced a cross-cultural product that reflected transnational influences and contributed to shaping the Italian popular imaginary. Italy’s peculiar political history enables me to use comics to examine how society developed from an authoritarian regime to democracy from a perspective still largely unexplored. The project examines popular comics in Italy in the years between 1934, when the first American adventure comics were published, and 1965, when Valentina appeared, a female-focused comic that revolutionised the image of womanhood portrayed in comics. This analysis highlights changes in Italian culture and society and challenges the centrality of American comics in the English-speaking scholarship. By posing broader questions about interconnected cultures, showing how cultural specificities coexist with foreign models, and how foreign gender models adapt to a specific context, my research project will provide ground-breaking perspectives on comics’ reinterpretation and incorporation of American culture in the Italian context, showing how the two cultures are deeply intertwined.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/101105911
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e50a856300&appId=PPGMS
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e520739d1c&appId=PPGMS
Data: CORDIS, © European Union