This seminar will be a hybrid event where the speaker will be presenting in- person and the talk will be streamed via zoom. Those who want to attend physically are more than welcome to join us in meeting room 929 at Eilert Sundt’s building.
Abstract
Historical research has shown how the whiteness of Italians has long been an uncertain fact, fluid, to be conquered and legally defined. Less attention has been paid to how sexist violence against women has been a central element in affirming whiteness as a constitutive element of Italianness and at the same time reproducing forms of oppression of women. In this lecture I will examine two episodes: the 2019 action of the feminist movement Non una di meno against the statue of journalist Indro Montanelli, and the terrorist attack carried out by Luca Traini in 2018 in Macerata in which he shot six passersby of African origin. These two episodes, different in character, allow us to examine the challenges of doing an ethnographic analysis of whiteness in a context, as Italy, where it is never directly enunciated, but is produced in social relations, with material consequences on people's lives. To understand the link between these two episodes, I will refer to the notion of cultural archive to investigate how racism and Italian colonial past were and are obscured and therefore reproduced in contemporary Italy, claiming that racism operates with other power relations in society.
Biography
Valeria Ribeiro Corossacz earned her doctorate in social anthropology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales of Paris and the University of Siena in 2003. Corossacz’s main areas of scientific interest are racism, sexism, class inequalities in different fields in Brazil.
Since 1996 Corossacz has been conducting fieldwork in Brazil. Most studies about racism and sexism in Brazil focus on underprivileged groups. Corossacz is one of the first to study these topics from the point of view of dominant groups. She argues that to understand the reproduction of race, gender, and class inequality it is crucial to study the subjects who occupy a position of structural advantage. In 2018 she published White Middle-Class men in Rio de Janerio: The Making of a dominant subject.
Much of Corossacz work to date has focused on whiteness, paid domestic work, reproduction of class inequalities, feminist anthropology and ethnography, feminist theories and practices. In her articles on domestic workers in Brazil, she argues that domestic workers’ battles thus pave the way for a broader political project that aims to dismantle structures of inequality such as racism, sexism and class inequality and their intersections.